Inter-operator resource sharing based on network virtualization

Mobile Network Virtualization (NV) is an emerging technique where multiple mobile network providers can share the infrastructure and the physical resources with each other, which leads to the improvement of system performance and the reduce of overall costs. In this paper, we propose a framework for inter-operator resource sharing through base station (BS) virtualization in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. A Soft-Defined Network (SDN) based control layer is also designed for better control of NV. Considering both the system and user equipment (UE), detailed NV and UE offloading processes are described in two scenarios where operators have imbalanced load or similarly non-heavy load. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves significant gains in terms of aggregate system throughput and its performance with different parameters is analyzed through simulation.