Radio Access Network sharing in cellular networks

TLDR

Mobile operators face surging traffic from smartphones and data services, while revenue per byte falls as traffic shifts from voice to video and data. To address traffic growth and reduce costs, operators are adopting RAN sharing to enhance coverage and capacity with lower investment and operating expenses. NetShare implements a two‑level scheduler that first guarantees minimum resource allocations for each entity and then proportionally distributes remaining resources across basestations, achieving performance isolation and efficient allocation. LTE‑based simulations and a WiMAX prototype demonstrate that NetShare provides effective isolation and high resource utilization for each entity.

Abstract

Mobile operators are witnessing a dramatic increase in traffic spurred by a combination of popularity of smartphones, innovative applications and diverse services. As mobile traffic transitions from being voice dominated to video and data dominated, the revenue per byte for the mobile operators is declining at an unhealthy rate. To counter the traffic growth and build cost-effective networks, many operators are now forging alliances for RAN (Radio Access Network) sharing to improve coverage and capacity at reasonable investments and operational costs. This paper presents the design and implementation of NetShare, a network-wide radio resource management framework that provides effective RAN Sharing. NetShare introduces a novel two-level scheduler split between the mobile gateway and the cellular basestations to effectively manage and allocate the wireless resources of the radio access network composed of multiple basestations among multiple different entities (such as operators, content providers, etc.) that share the network. Firstly, NetShare provides performance isolation across entities with a minimum guaranteed resource allocation to each entity across the network. Secondly, NetShare optimally distributes the resources to each entity across the network proportional to the resource demand at each basestation. Through extensive LTE-based system simulations and prototype evaluations on a WiMAX testbed, we show the efficacy of NetShare in (a) providing isolation across entities and (b) efficiently distributing resources for each entity across the network thus achieving high utilization of resources for an entity.