Joint Spectrum Sharing and ABS Adaptation for Network Virtualization in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Network virtualization (NV) is a promising solution for higher resource utilization, improved system performance, and lower investment capitals for network operators. Spectrum sharing is an important issue for NV in the wireless networks. Meanwhile, the scheme of Almost Blank Subframe (ABS) causes new challenge for NV in the heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNet). This paper aims at investigating the joint optimization problem of spectrum sharing and ABS adaptation, and the optimization target is represented through general utility functions of logical virtual operators (LVOs). We formulate the problem, and decouple it into two subproblems. We propose a dynamic programming based algorithm for the spectrum sharing subproblem, and an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based algorithm for the ABS adaptation subproblem. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.