Resource allocation in wireless virtualized networks with energy harvesting

Abstract

Wireless network virtualization and energy harvesting are two major candidate technologies for the future wireless networks. In this paper, we consider a downlink multi-channel wireless virtualized network consisting of a physical base station (PBS) and multiple mobile user equipments (MUEs) with energy harvesting capability. The PBS is owned by an infrastructure provider (InP) and is virtualized into a set of virtual BSs (VBSs). Each VBS is owned by a virtual network operator (VNO) and serves a set of MUEs by using the allocated channels. Specifically, each MUE can use all the channels allocated to the serving VBS and different MUEs share the channels by using TDMA. In addition, each MUE can harvest energy and decode information from the signals transmitted from the VBS, i.e., each MUE is allocated with a fraction of time for information decoding and harvests energy in the rest time fractions. Under the above setup, we investigate the problem to maximize the sum rate of the MUEs by optimizing the channel allocation, the power allocation and the time allocation, under the maximum transmit power constraint and the minimum harvested energy constraint. The problem is nonconvex and we propose an efficient iterative algorithm based on alternating direction optimization method (ADOM) to address it. It is shown that the proposed algorithm converges fast and outperforms the reference algorithms without wireless network virtualization.