Opportunistic sharing scheme for spectrum allocation in wireless virtualization

The past few decades have witnessed an increasing growth in mobile and wireless network, leading to a corresponding fast growth in mobile demands. However, the proliferating mobile demands compel wireless network to face several challenges, such as the conflict between spectrum crisis and low resource utilization ratio, and the poor quality of service and quality of experience. Wireless virtualization, enabling multiple concurrent virtual networks running on shared wireless substrate resource, has been proposed as a promising way to overcome the plights of the current mobile and wireless network. How to efficiently allocate the resource, especially the spectrum resource, of physical network to multiple virtual networks is one fundamental and important challenge in wireless virtualization. This paper rethinks the characteristics of virtual networks’ requirements, and then divides the requirement into a baseline part and a fluctuant part. Based on it, this paper introduces an opportunistic spectrum sharing approach, through which we formulate the spectrum resource allocation problem as an NP-Hard problem. Then, we propose our opportunistic spectrum resource allocation scheme for the wireless virtualization. Simulations validate the performance advantages of our approach and show that opportunistic spectrum sharing significantly improves the revenue, resource utilization and acceptance ratio of physical wireless network while decreasing the payments of virtual networks.