Approaches to Joint Base Station Selection and Adaptive Slicing in Virtualized Wireless Networks

Wireless network virtualization is a promising avenue of research for next-generation 5G cellular networks. This work investigates the problem of selecting base stations to construct virtual networks for a set of service providers, and adaptive slicing of the resources between the service providers to satisfy service provider demands. A two-stage stochastic optimization framework is introduced to solve this problem, and two methods are presented for approximating the stochastic model. The first method uses a sampling approach applied to the deterministic equivalent program of the stochastic model. The second method uses a genetic algorithm for base station selection and adaptively slicing via a single-stage linear optimization problem. A number of scenarios are simulated using a log-normal model designed to emulate demand from real world cellular networks. Simulations indicate that the first approach can provide a reasonably tight solution, but is constrained as the time expense grows exponentially with the number of parameters. The second approach provides a significant improvement in run time with the introduction of marginal error.