A contract-based resource allocation mechanism in wireless virtualized network

摘要

The rapidly increasing mobile traffic demand poses both new communication requirements and challenges on existing communication networks in terms of technologies and business models. Wireless network virtualization is a promising technology to provide service-based architecture and contract theory is a powerful framework from microeconomics for providing tools to model incentive mechanisms. In this work, a novel contract theoretic incentive mechanism is proposed to study how to provide services to multiple users in the wireless virtualized networks. Infrastructure providers (InPs) is considered to own the physical networks and mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) has the information of the users and needs to lease the physical radio resources for providing services to subscribed users. In particular, a contract theoretic approach is utilized to model the trading process between the MVNO and multiple InPs. Subsequently, the corresponding optimal contract is derived respectively to maximize the payoff of the MVNOs while maintaining the benefits of the InPs in the trading process. With numerical results, it can be observed that the proposed contract theoretic approach can effectively stimulate InPs' participation, improve the payoff of the MVNO and outperform other schemes.