Towards Wireless Infrastructure-as-a-Service (WIaaS) for 5G Software-Defined Cellular Systems

As a key enabling technology for 5G cellular systems, wireless virtualization allows multiple service providers to simultaneously and independently serve their users via virtualized network slices. However, differently from wired network virtualization that has been studied for many years, the research of wireless resource slicing is still at a very early stage. In this paper, based on the proposed 5G software-defined systems, novel wireless infrastructure-as-a-service (WIaaS) is introduced, which enables mobile virtual network operators to provide distinguished services to their subscribed users while sharing a common physical infrastructure. Specifically, through software-defined networking and fine-grained base station designs, a throughput-efficient resource allocation is proposed, by which, at the same time, (1) the data-rate requirements of traffic flows in virtual networks are fulfilled, (2) the isolation among applications and deployed protocols in networks is guarded, and (3) the global resource utilization is maximized. Simulations confirm that the proposed solution outperforms state-of-the-art schemes with greater system throughput and fairness support. Moreover, the performance improvement becomes significant when transmitted data has real-time requirements or the flow density and diversity are increased. Thus, WIaaS facilitates wireless resource slicing upon software-defined architectures and has opened a new research area of virtualization in next-generation cellular systems.