Mixing MACs: An Introduction to Hybrid Radio Wireless Virtualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid wireless virtualization controller that manages heterogeneous radios using airtime as a unified metric, enabling dynamic resource allocation to enhance network revenue and throughput.

Contribution

It proposes a novel HWV controller architecture that unifies management of diverse wireless radios and demonstrates its effectiveness through simulation results.

Findings

Up to 40% revenue increase in virtualized base stations and APs.

Effective dynamic reprovisioning of slice quotas.

Unified airtime metric for heterogeneous radio management.

Abstract

This study presents the design of the hybrid wireless virtualization HWV controller based network architecture. Using a HWV controller, an unified approach can be taken for provisioning and management of virtualized heterogeneous radios, irrespective of their MAC and PHY layer mechanisms. It is shown that the airtime occupancy by transmissions from different slices or groups can be used as a single metric for tying these virtualized platforms. The HWV controller can account and dynamically reprovision slice quotas, which can be used for maximizing the revenue of the network operator or aggregate system throughput performance. Results from simulations show that an HWV controller based infrastructure is able to improve the revenue generated from a single virtualized basestation and an AP by up to 40 percent under tested conditions.