Mobile Network Virtualization (NV) is an emerging technique which has drawn increasingly research attention. Network Virtualization enables multiple network operators to share a common infrastructure (including core network, transport network and access network) so as to reduce the investment capital while improving the overall performance at the same time. This is achieved by exploring the multiplexing gain. Similarly, Load Balancing (LB) is a well-known mechanism used in mobile networks to offload excessive traffic from high-load cells (hot spots) to low-load ones within one network operator. This paper aims at investigating the potential gain of applying NV in LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks and compares it with the LB scheme gain. In this paper, we propose an LTE virtualization framework (that enables spectrum sharing) and a dynamic load balancing scheme for multi-eNB and multi-VO (Virtual Operator) systems. We compare the performance gain of both schemes for different applications, e.g. VoIP, video, HTTP and FTP. We also investigate the parameterization of both schemes, e.g. sharing intervals, LB intervals and safety margins, in order to find the optimal parameter settings. The presented results show that the LTE networks can benefit from both NV and LB techniques.
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