LTE Wireless Network Virtualization: Dynamic Slicing via Flexible Scheduling

The successful virtualization of wireless access networks is strongly affected by the way in which radio resources are managed. The Infrastructure Provider (InP) is required to deploy efficient and flexible scheduling techniques to dynamically allocate the resources for the users associated with different Service Providers (SPs). Service contracts with different SPs and fairness among their users are crucial to the success of the virtualization scheme deployed by the InP. In this paper we develop an efficient resource allocation scheme to allocate the radio resource blocks in LTE networks. The scheme keeps track of the service contracts with the SPs and also the fairness requirements between cell-center users and cell-edge users. Also the scheme allows the flexible definition of fairness requirements for different SPs. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated and the results show that the proposed low-complexity scheme is very efficient in terms of computation time and its performance in terms of sum rate is close to the results due to the relaxed solution and coordinate search algorithm.