Resource Allocation for elastic traffic in mobile networks shared by multiple operators

Abstract

The traditional model of single ownership of the mobile network infrastructure is being challenged by the forecasted mobile data tsunami. In this context, the sharing of network infrastructure among operators has emerged as a way to ensure operators’ future cost competitiveness. While the elementary concepts related to passive sharing are already exploited,active sharing is raising in importance. The work presented in this thesis presents a solution for active RAN sharing in new generation cellular networks that takes into account inter and intra operator fairness and has desirable properties from base station and user association perspectives. An offline centralized approximation algorithm that provides theoretical performance guarantees is proposed. Making use of the available real-time neighbour information we designed an approximated distributed algorithm with a log(e) additive ratio. Finally, we confirm the theoretical results by a set of performance evaluations in a LTE-Advanced system-level simulator.