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Network slicing is considered to be a key feature of the 5th generation mobile networks. It permits multiple tenants, i.e. mobile virtual network operators, to share virtual resources. However, each tenant only considers the individual slice utility, which leads to unfair resource allocation among tenants. To achieve the aim that the infrastructure provider can fairly allocate virtual resources to tenants, a two‐layer resource allocation architecture in a heterogeneous radio access network (RAN) is proposed and it is formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). The existence of the solution in the lower layer is proved via the properties of the quasi‐variational problem, indicating that the MPEC is solvable. Combining the two‐layer architecture and successive convex approximation method, a fair algorithm is proposed, which provides fair resource allocation strategies for the infrastructure provider. Compared with the existing static slicing and social optimal methods, the analysis and simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm weighs the utilities of the total network system and each tenant. In addition, regarding their utilities, the gap between the proposed method and the social optimal is within 5%, which outperforms static slicing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In network virtualization, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) lease spectrum resources from mobile network operators (MNOs) and offer certain wireless services to end users. Each MVNO competes with others using optimal price and spectrum inventory so as to profit. However, the inventory of one MVNO is private information and maybe unknown to others, which makes pricing decisions difficult for MVNOs. In this work, we first study the pricing strategy given others’ inventory information. We model the pricing decision problem using the non-cooperative game theory, and develop an optimal price setting algorithm based on an ordinal potential game. Then we put forward three cooperation strategies for MVNOs and analyze the impacts of the coalitions structure on pricing decision. For the situation where the inventory of one MVNO is unknown to others, we use the Bayesian coalition formation game to formulate the pricing decision problem and propose an optimal price setting algorithm based on the Minimum Mean-Square Error to resolve the conflicts resulting from the uncertainty. Next we define a Belief Pareto Order to characterize the preferences of MVNOs regarding the coalition structures. Then we devise a distributed coalition formation algorithm with the proposed belief Pareto order to achieve a Bayesian-Nash stable coalition structure that enables each MVNO to maximize its own revenue. Finally, simulation results demonstrate comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed game model and provide a guidance on pricing strategies for MVNOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Telecommunication is described by enormous settled, sunk, and irreversible speculation, which makes it high-hazard undertaking. The circumstance is additionally aggravated in the mobile part by progressive ages of innovation. The introduction of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) added value for both operators and customers; for the operators by using their available excess capacity and for the customers by offering innovative and several niche value-added services that were not offered by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). However, mobile operators in developing nations are urban and semi-urban based, and very few operators provide services in rural areas. There are many un-served and under-served market segments still available. The major issue for developing nations is the formulation and implementation of policies, rules, and regulations. With an extensive variety of brands, companies are willing to enter the mobile business. An exclusively exploited radio access network by mobile network operators, new concepts and strategies are required to bring the opportunity for both telecom and non-telecom organizations to take part in the mobile sector. In this paper, we aim to develop a regulatory framework for MVNO in developing nations' telecommunication market as follows: first, to carry out a thorough analysis of market and draft a feasibility study for MVNOs in the telecommunications ("telecom") market in developing nations; and second, to develop required regulations for enhanced growth opportunities in the telecom market. This can be regarded as the effort for creating infrastructure for deploying e-Government in the developing countries. Highlights • We examined deployment of Mobile Virtual Network Operator in developing nations. • A new regulatory framework and guidelines for MVNO were proposed. • We analyzed the best global practices on MVNO. • MVNO was discussed in Telecom Market where international practices are zero level. • It is a reference document for the government to put the sector into priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a monitoring application where sensors periodically report data to a common receiver using time division multiplexing. The sensors are constrained by the limited and unpredictable energy availability provided by energy harvesting (EH), and by the channel impairments. To maximize the quality of the reported data, the packets transmitted contain newly generated data blocks together with up to $r - 1$ previously unsuccessfully delivered ones, where $r$ is a design parameter. These data blocks are compressed, concatenated, and encoded with a channel code. The scheme applies lossy compression, such that the fidelity of the individual blocks is traded off with the reliability provided by the channel code. We show that the proposed strategy outperforms the one in which retransmissions are not allowed. We also investigate the tradeoff between the value of $r$ , the compression and the coding rates, under the constraints of the energy availability, and, once $r$ has been decided, use a Markov decision process (MDP) to optimize the compression/coding rates. Finally, we implement a reinforcement learning algorithm, through which devices can learn the optimal transmission policy without knowing a priori the statistics of the EH process, and show that it indeed reaches the performance obtained via MDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of smart mobile devices and various mobile applications, content-oriented service has become the most popular service which occupies network resources and results in high traffic load. In order to improve quality of experience in radio access network and reduce the OpEx and CapEx of operators, wireless network virtualization and network slicing come into the vision and are deemed as promising solutions to radio access networks to provide tailored services. Therefore, network slicing and optimization based on content-oriented service become a challenging research direction. In this paper, network slicing and resource optimization on content-oriented application in cache-enabled hybrid radio access network based on complex network are investigated. A Cooperative Network Slicing Framework Based on Content in RAN (CNSC-RAN) is presented. Based on CNSC-RAN, procedures of content-oriented static network slicing and dynamic slicing are proposed. Content-oriented slicing is modeled and analyzed which includes slicing on content cache resources and communication resources. In order to obtain the optimized resources sliced for each content, the optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average system cost to get the contents required by users. The problem is solved by a heuristic algorithm called CCSOA (Content-Centric Slicing Optimization Algorithm) in a dynamic content-oriented network slicing procedure enabling UEs with self-evicting contents. The performance of CCSOA is evaluated by performance metrics including hit rate, average cache occupation, average system cost, and request traffic reduction to macro cell base station comparing with CEE and ProbCache. Simulation results reveal the effectiveness of CCSOA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise and Service Provider networks are increasingly making use of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) to reap the benefits of reduced Capital expenditures (CAPEX) and Operating expenses (OPEX). Total cost of ownership calculations however are typically a function of the attainable network performance, which in a virtualized system is highly dependent on the overall system architecture and the resource allocation policy. This paper examines how to improve the overall performance of deploying VNFs in a virtualized environment, proposing an appropriate architectural framework to leverage the capabilities of other technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Cloud Computing which can be highly complemented with the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm. We focus on the standardization of the three technologies under a common architecture and we incorporate resource allocation as a main functional architectural block. The problem studied is referred as the VNF placement problem, and tries to efficiently, intelligently, and dynamically allocate a series of VNFs comprising a service chain in a cloud environment according to the current status of the cloud resources. We propose and evaluate a set of algorithms towards satisfying the requirement of enterprise and service providers to grant high performance VNFs for the end users, while allowing the cloud providers to profitably utilize the available resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual radio access networks (RANs) is the candidate solution for 5G access networks, the concept of virtualised radio resources completing the virtual RAN paradigm. This paper proposes a new analytical model for the management of virtual radio resources in full heterogeneous networks. The estimation of network capacity and data rate allocation are the model's two main components. Based on the probability distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio observed at the user terminal, the model leads to the probability distribution for the total network data rate. It considers different approaches for the estimation of the total network data rate, based on different channel qualities, i.e., optimistic, realistic and pessimistic. The second component uses the outcome of the first one in order to maximise the weighted data rate subject to the total network capacity, the SLAs (service level agreements) of Virtual Network Operators (VNOs), and fairness. The weights for services in the objective function of the resource allocation component enable the model to have prioritisation among services. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated in a practical heterogeneous access network. Results show an increase of 2.5 times in network capacity by implementing an access point at the centre of each cell of a cellular network. It is shown that the cellular network capacity itself can vary from 0.9 Gbps in the pessimistic approach up to 5.5 Gbps in the optimistic one. Finally, the isolation of service classes and VNOs by means of virtualisation of radio resources is clearly demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile users often post nearest neighbor queries based on their current location. Usually, the mobile terminal (user) sends a request to query an untrusted location server, including the position information of the mobile terminal requests, thus leading to the disclosure of one's location. For mobile users providing location services, the privacy of mobile users is crucial. This demand is particularly evident in the mobile network application. According to the structural characteristics of the mobile network, the use of hidden ring and hidden tree can blur mobile subscriber location information in the mobile network and effectively ensure location privacy. This paper proposes a new method of protecting location privacy known as Hidden Ring and Hidden Forest (HRHF), which is the use of breadth-first search to meet certain requirements of the ring and forest in the graph. Based on experimental testing of real and simulated data sets, the HRHF method has demonstrated its effectiveness in protecting location privacy and efficiency in providing quality services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, sensor-rich smartphones potentially enable the harvesting of huge amounts of valuable sensing data in urban environments, by opportunistically involving citizens to play the role of mobile virtual sensors to cover Smart City areas of interest. This paper proposes an in-depth study of the challenging technical issues related to the efficient assignment of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) data collection tasks to volunteers in a crowdsensing campaign. In particular, the paper originally describes how to increase the effectiveness of the proposed sensing campaigns through the inclusion of several new facilities, including accurate participant selection algorithms able to profile and predict user mobility patterns, gaming techniques, and timely geo-notification. The reported results show the feasibility of exploiting profiling trends/prediction techniques from volunteers' behavior; moreover, they quantitatively compare different MCS task assignment strategies based on large-scale and real MCS data campaigns run in the ParticipAct living lab, an ongoing MCS real-world experiment that involved more than 170 students of the University of Bologna for more than one year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bandwidth is an extremely valuable and scarce resource in mobile networks; therefore, efficient mobility-aware bandwidth reservation is necessary to support multimedia applications (e.g., video streaming) that require quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we propose a distributed bandwidth reservation scheme called the mobility-prediction-aware bandwidth reservation (MPBR) scheme. The objective of MPBR is to reduce handoff call dropping rate and maintain acceptable new call blocking rate while providing efficient bandwidth utilization. MPBR consists of 1) a handoff time estimation (HTE) scheme that aims to estimate the time windows when a user will perform handoffs along the path to his destination, 2) an available bandwidth estimation (ABE) scheme that aims to estimate in advance available bandwidth, during the computed time windows in the cells to be traversed by the user to his destination, and 3) an efficient call admission control (ECaC) scheme that aims to control bandwidth allocation in the network cells. The simulation results show that MPBR outperforms existing schemes in terms of reducing handoff call dropping rate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today?s mobile customers desire to remain connected anywhere, at any time, and using any device. This phenomenon has encouraged mobile network operators to build complex network architectures by incorporating new features and extensions, which are harder to manage and operate. In this article we propose a novel and simplified architecture for mobile networks. The proposed architecture, which we call CSDN (Cellular SDN), leverages software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). SDN abstracts the network and separates the control plane from the data plane; NFV decouples logical network functions from the underlying hardware, for dynamic resource orchestration. Furthermore, we argue that dynamic resource orchestration and optimal control need real-time context data analyses to make intelligent decisions. Thus, in the proposed architecture we exploit the capability of the mobile edge networks to gather information related to the network as well as the users. This information can be used to optimize network utilization and application performance, and to enhance the user experience. In addition, the gathered data can be shared with third party service providers, enabling the realization of innovative services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article first analyzes the requirements and challenges in the future 5G mobile wireless network. Then the authors describe a new method for radio access technologies called virtual RATs. The proposed scheme can provide a flexible and tailored access network that can meet the requirements and overcome the challenges in mobile broadband networks. The authors also present a high level design of the overall architecture and protocol stack for virtual RATs. Two concepts, virtual RAT Types and interface sets, are introduced. Two essential features, flexible control/user (C/U) plane separation and coordination between virtual RATs, are also discussed. Examples are provided to show how to achieve a flexible and tailored access network for services by using virtual RATs. Finally, the capability of hardware to support implementation of virtual RATs is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]