RadioVisor: A Slicing Plane for Radio Access Networks

To cope with the exponential traffic growth, increasingly diverse trafficc mix including voice, video, machine-to-machine (M2M), and the spectrum shortage, wireless networks have to get densely deployed and dynamically adapt to meet the distinct requirements of diverse traffic classes. However, current network architectures are ill-equipped to support a dense and dynamic wireless infrastructure. First, since it will be impossible to obtain regularly placed cell sites for an infrastructure with higher density, basestations will be deployed wherever possible in a chaotic fashion. However, a chaotic and dense wireless deployment will be very complex to manage, since it will experience highly variable loads and unpredictable inter-cell interference among other things. Further since spectrum is limited, very likely all the basestations will be operating on the same frequency (referred to as frequency reuse factor of one). This leads to a tremendous amount of inter-cell interference, and that becomes the limiting factor for network capacity. Second, a dense infrastructure is very expensive to deploy and operate. Current deployments are unaffordable except to the largest operators, so a deployment with significantly higher density will likely be enormously expensive even for the largest operators, preventing smaller operators from expanding and offering consumers the choices they need.