End-to-end programmable, cloud-based virtualized HetNet: Advances made & challenges to address

Future networks (5G and beyond) will demand provisioning of novel services with a varied range of service requirements, and an order of magnitude increase of wireless data traffic, while at the same time decreasing the network operation cost. To address these issues, wireless network virtualization is seen as a key enabling technology for future networks. Virtualization offers cost-effective and efficient resource utilization by sharing the resources among multiple operators. Also, in contrast to traditional service specific inflexible network implementations, adoption of innovative network technologies demand certain level of flexibility and control over the networking fabric. In this respect, we argue that, for realizing a programmable and flexible heterogeneous virtual network infrastructure, software defined networking (SDN) & cloud computing technologies are the key tools to leverage on. This will ensure efficient resource utilization through sharing, enable programming of the underlying heterogeneous network infrastructure as a system and provide on-demand, elastic resource provisioning. In this paper, we lay out the key requirements and architectural components of end-to-end programmable heterogeneous virtual wireless networks (HVWNs). To report on the advances made in the pertinent technologies in realizing a HVWN architecture, we also present a brief survey of research on wireless network that leverage SDN, programmable radio plane and cloud computing technologies. We also investigate various actors and their roles in such HVWN environment and address various research issues and challenges in realizing such an architecture.