Wireless Network Virtualization With Multicast Communications

As a flexible network sharing mechanism, wireless network virtualization (WNV) can significantly improve the resource utilization and reduce the overall expense for the next generation wireless networks. Considering the users' common interests on popular contents, we introduce wireless multicast into wireless virtual networks. To serve the users who have requests on the same content via multicast transmission, both the virtual resources and content can be shared simultaneously. Thus, the virtual resources and backhaul bandwidth can be further released. In this paper, we propose a novel WNV based multicast system. Subsequently, the multicast group forming and sub-channel allocation strategies are jointly investigated in considered frameworks. Then we formulate the strategies as an integer nonlinear programming problem. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic algorithm with the aid of cutting-plane method to tackle the problem. Finally, Simulation results verify that our proposed scheme can significantly enhance the total utility of wireless virtual networks with lower backhaul usage and the proposed heuristic algorithm can achieve a perfect performance.