Cellular communications are evolving to facilitate the current and expected increasing needs of Quality of Service (QoS), high data rates and diversity of offered services. Towards this direction, Radio Access Network (RAN) virtualization aims at providing solutions of mapping virtual network elements onto radio resources of the existing physical network. This paper proposes the Resources nEgotiation for NEtwork Virtualization (RENEV) algorithm, suitable for application in Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) environments, consisting of a macro evolved NodeB (eNB) overlaid with small cells. By exploiting Radio Resource Management (RRM) principles, RENEV achieves slicing and on demand delivery of resources. Leveraging the multi-tenancy approach, radio resources are transferred in terms of physical radio Resource Blocks (RBs) among multiple heterogeneous base stations, interconnected via the X2 interface. The main target is to deal with traffic variations in geographical dimension. All signaling design considerations under the current Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE-A architecture are also investigated. Analytical studies and simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate RENEV in terms of network's throughput as well as its additional signaling overhead. Moreover we show that RENEV can be applied independently on top of already proposed schemes for RAN virtualization to improve their performance. The resultsindicate that significant merits are achieved both from network's and users' perspective as well as that it is a scalable solution for different number of small cells.

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Radio Access Network (RAN) virtualization is a promising commercial solution where multiple service providers can share underlying radio physical resources and dynamically compose heterogeneous virtual networks that coexist in isolation within the same physical infrastructure. Based on the expected future requirements, this work proposes a solution named Resources nEgotiation for NEtwork Virtualization (RENEV), which can be applied in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) environments, consisting of numerous small cells. This algorithm aims at achieving an efficient mapping of radio virtual network elements onto the radio resources of the existing physical network, utilizing the concept of radio resource transfer. It establishes a common virtualized control layer by handling the resources in an holistic way. The proposed solution achieves significant gains in terms of system throughput and its performance is evaluated by means of analytical model, as well as simulation results.

In cellular systems, Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) partitions each cell into two regions; inner region and outer region and allocates different frequency band to each region. Since the users at the inner region are less exposed to inter-cell interference, the frequency resources in each inner region can be universally used. Based on this frequency band allocation, FFR may reduce channel interference and offer large system capacity. This paper proposes a mechanism that selects the optimal FFR scheme based on the user throughput and user satisfaction. In detail, the mechanism selects the optimal size of the inner and outer region for each cell as well as the optimal frequency allocation between these regions that either maximizes the mean user throughput or the user satisfaction. The mechanism is evaluated through several simulation scenarios.

This paper provides a brief overview and a vision for introducing a Quality of Experience (QoE) function for on-demand services or for premium users, based-on Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The proposed "QoE-service" can take advantage of the SDN global resource view and complementary QoE metrics to assure the desired performance for OTT applications by adopting traffic management mechanisms. This paper introduces the QoE-Service concept and SDN architecture and it presents a set of use cases that demonstrate its suitability and applicability to Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks.

Resource provisioning in multi-operator scenarios requires an estimate of the tenants' traffic needs. This is necessary in the scenario where a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) owns the Radio Access Network (RAN) and many Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) act as resellers of their host network's capacity under their own brands, to their own customers. In such scenarios, the forecasted MVNO traffic is the basis for providing resources suitable with the corresponding MVNOs demand. To that end, the dynamic provision of resources among MVNOs should be performed in flexible, short-term time scales. In this paper, we effectively address this issue by integrating the capacity broker into the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) network management network architecture using the minimum set of enhancements. In addition, to fully exploit its capabilities, we propose the Multi-tenant Slicing (MuSli) of capacity algorithm, to allocate resources towards MVNOs in coarse time scales. MuSli considers the estimated capacity and the impact of the traffic type (i.e., guaranteed QoS and Best-Effort) in each MVNO, to provide better utilization of the host network's capacity. Our results highlight the gains in the number of served requests without compromising their service quality.

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In this paper, we propose the Base Station (BS) Agnostic Framework for Network SliCing, NetSliC, that creates network slices for the Radio Access Network (RAN) based on the service requirements. Current cellular RAN is a heterogeneous complex architecture, comprising legacy distributed Small Cells (SCs), Radio Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) connected to a centralized Base Band Unit (BBU), and future 5G NodeBs (gNBs) leveraging virtualization with different functional splits, serving distinct traffic profiles. Thus, NetSliC is a common language that manages and controls this heterogeneous infrastructure. We consider several criteria for creating network slices in this particularly interesting future scenario, which are applicable to all different types of access and transport interfaces of the distinct BSs. The goal of our work is to propose NetSliC, a framework that creates wireless slices in a cellular RAN independently of the type of BS (i.e., BS agnostic) and on the same time achieves desirable service capability across the various traffic profiles.