AMPHIBIA: A Cognitive Virtualization Platform for End-to-End Slicing

Abstract

To cope with the increasingly diversifying services, QoS, and network architectures, network virtualization is a promising technology that enables the concurrent deployment of multiple network technologies on a shared network. However, traditional research on network virtualization preliminarily focuses on a wired environment and network virtualization for a wireless environment is not well studied. Considering that in near-future, various wireless technologies will play the most important role in access networks and multi-mode wireless terminals will become more popular, it is crucial to extend the concept of network virtualization to wireless networks. We refer to building such extended virtual networks as "end-to-end slicing". The key technical challenges for such extension are (1) abstraction of heterogeneous wireless access networks for maximizing radio frequency utilization and (2) isolation of wireless resources such as radio frequencies, throughput, or name spaces for accommodating multiple virtual networks on a single wireless access network. In this paper, we tackle the first challenge and propose a Cognitive Virtualization Platform, called AMPHIBIA, which enables end-to-end slicing over heterogeneous wired and wireless networks. AMPHIBIA is a platform to provide independent virtual networks each of which can be configured for the corresponding service and to coordinate the resource management in both sides of wired and wireless networks, exploiting the network virtualization and cognitive radio technology. AMPHIBIA is motivated by the shared property of "reconfigurability" of network virtualization and cognitive radio, and provides network operators with the capability of cooperative resource allocation over wired and wireless networks. In other words, AMPHIBIA virtualizes a cognitive base station to dynamically configure a wireless access network for each virtual network. In this paper, we first show the basic architecture of AMPHIBIA from the perspective of network virtualization. Then we show the hardware and software design of prototype system.