Page 165 - ITU Journal, Future and evolving technologies - Volume 1 (2020), Issue 1, Inaugural issue

ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies, Volume 1 (2020), Issue 1

Methodology
Classification Stochastic Geometry Simulation Optimization Other
h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h
traffic load [40] [67]
SINR [54], [71] [120] [80]
SINR coverage [71], [81]
Network probability
Measures
Throughput [67]
User rate [81], [145]
Sector overload [114]
Packet drop proba- [114]
bility
Revenue [75]
Economic CAPEX [75] [106]
Measures OPEX [75]
Miscellaneous [75] [67], [80]

Table 2 – Performance evaluation classification

off between satisfying the resource shares and improving the fact that a conventional MVNO competes with its
the overall (system) spectral efficiency when the agreed MNO, while there is no such competition between an
resource shares are violated in a controlled fashion. The InP and its SPs/VOs/VNOs/MVNOs. In these lines,
work in [53] considers a global scheduler taking deci- some articles tend to “misuse” the term InP when they
sions for clusters of BSs and therefore scheduling users of consider the InP to provide services also to end users.
multiple MNOs over a 3D time-frequency-space resource Additionally an InP is also referred to as a Network
grid. In [53] scheduling is performed with the objective Service Provider (NSP). Moreover, the work in [91] en-
of maximizing the overall system utility. The authors visions three different types of stakeholders in line with
in [34] propose a BS virtualization scheme which per- the ones in the cloud computing domain, i.e., the InP
forms scheduling in two levels, namely, among MNOs, providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the MVNO
and for each MNO, among its user flows. Hew et al. in providing Network as a Service (NaaS) and the SP pro-
[57] consider a network shared by multiple MNOs, each viding Software as a Service (SaaS). For instance, in [89]
of them serving both a set of end users and a set of the authors address a scenario in which there are mul-
MVNOs. In this context, the problem of resource allo- tiple InPs, a single MVNO and multiple SPs where the
cation is tackled in two steps: first, the resource sharing MVNO acts as a reseller of resources from InPs to SPs.
among MNOs, and then the resource sharing among the It should also be noted that the terms slicing and slice
users and the MVNOs of each MNO, where the resource are also misused in some articles in non-5G contexts,
sharing at each step is modeled as a bargaining problem. in the sense that, such articles do not consider problem
The study in [69] suggests an algorithm that fairly allo- instances that account for 5G service requirements.
cates the shared radio resources among MNOs. In [105]
the authors propose Remote Radio Head (RRH) assign- There is a large body of literature on resource man-
ment algorithms for an SDN-based Cloud Radio Access agements concerning InPs and SPs in the context of
Network (C-RAN) shared by multiple MNOs. WNV. The vast majority of articles in this litera-
ture considers a single InP and multiple SPs (see e.g.,
Concerning WNV, the problem of resource management [7,8,17,31,42,50,58,59,62,63,68,73,76,79,97,123,130,
is crucial in the interaction between an InP and its SPs. 132,133,136,138,146,151,154,155]). However, there are
In the context of this paper, an InP is an entity which exceptions: e.g., the work in [32] considers a single InP
is responsible for the infrastructure deployment, man- and a single VNO which serves multiple users through
agement and operation and does not serve end users an SDN-based virtualized network provided by the InP.
directly whereas an SP is an entity which does not have The VNO faces the problem of scheduling its users, each
any resources of its own but purchases or rents resources characterized by a maximum delay over a finite time
from an InP to provision services for its end users. It is period, through resources rented by the InP with the
worth noticing that the terminology concerning the SP objective of minimizing the payments made to the InP
varies across different articles: such an entity is also re- for the rented resources. There are also articles which
ferred to as a Virtual Operator (VO), a Virtual Network consider both multiple InPs and multiple SPs (and few
Operator (VNO) or a Mobile Virtual Network Operator other variations with multiple InPs) which however are
(MVNO). Also notice that the conventional MVNO ob- more pertinent to Section 3.5 hence discussed therein.
tains resources from an MNO which serves end users
of its own, unlike the InP. The key difference lies in As for the literature on a single InP and multiple SPs,

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