In the current mobile communications marketplace, functionalities that enable various forms of network sharing are becoming more and more important. Researchers from Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Portugal, Luisa_Caeiro and Filipe D. Cardoso together with Luis M. Correia from University of Lisbon are working on the virtualisation of the wireless access in order to provide required capacity to a virtual base stations instantiated in a geographical area. They presented their work on the 1st International Conference on 5G for Ubiquitous Connectivity.
In the wireless networks sharing approach, operators are forced to use similar network functions as having different, isolated virtual networks with theirs own functions and communication protocols is not possible. Network virtualisation is an abstraction process, aiming at separating the logical network functionality from the underlying physical network resources. It enables the aggregation and provision of the network by combining different physical networks into a single virtual one, or splitting a physical network into multiple virtual ones, which are isolated from each other.
Scientists tested the virtual radio resource allocation to provide the required capacity to the base stations, optimising radio resources utilisation.
Network visualisation has been introduced as a tool for large scale experiment networks and has been also proposed as an approach for a future Internet architecture.
Read more about the future architecture of the Internet here .
