Distributed Virtual Resource Allocation in Small-Cell Networks With Full-Duplex Self-Backhauls and Virtualization

Abstract

Wireless network virtualization has attracted great attention from both academia and industry. Another emerging technology for next-generation wireless networks is in-band full-duplex (FD) communications. Due to its promising performance, FD communication has been considered to be an effective way of achieving self-backhauls for small cells. In this paper, we introduce wireless virtualization into small-cell networks and propose a virtualized small-cell network architecture with FD self-backhauls. We formulate the virtual-resource-allocation problem in virtualized small-cell networks with FD self-backhauls as an optimization problem. Since the formulated problem is a mixed combinatorial and nonconvex optimization problem, its computational complexity is high. Moreover, the centralized scheme may suffer from signaling overhead, outdated dynamics information, and scalability issues. To solve it efficiently, we divide the original problem into two subproblems. For the first subproblem, we transfer it to a convex optimization problem and then solve it by an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based distributed algorithm. The second subproblem is a convex problem, which can be solved by each infrastructure provider. Extensive simulations are conducted with different system configurations to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.