A Service-Oriented Approach for Radio Resource Management in Virtual RANs

Abstract

Virtualisation, as a key role player of future mobile communications, promotes the idea of service-oriented architectures. This paper proposes a model of Radio Resource Management (RRM) for emerging Virtual Radio Access Networks, based on the interaction between two separated management entities: Common-RRM (CRRM) to coordinate the radio resources among the Radio Access Technologies (RATs) and a centralised virtualisation platform on top of it, called Virtual-RRM (VRRM), which is responsible for service orchestration among Virtual Network Operators, enabling the definition of various services and policies, separately from vendors and underlying RATs. The main objective of VRRM is to satisfy the Service Level Agreements associated with different service classes to the highest possible level, within the framework of proportional fairness. On the other hand, CRRM is in charge of mapping the demanded capacity of each service onto the most suitable RATs. The model is further extended to deal with extreme situations of resource shortage, resulting from high traffic loads, by introducing delay to lower priority services. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated in a practical multi-RAT scenario. Results confirm that the isolation of service classes is consistent with the introduced serving weights, while all the demanded capacities from different services are responded by the most suitable RATs. Finally, independent of the variation of traffic load, 100% of the aggregated capacity is used.