Spectrum trading in virtualized multi-tenant 5G networks

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this research work, we analyze the problem of spectrum trading in virtualized multi-tenant 5G networks using principles from matching theory. More specifically, we deal with the matching problem among the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and we propose a matching scheme that takes into account the preferences of each entity in terms of different utility variables. Our proposal includes a many-to-many matching scheme, that is an extension of the deferred acceptance algorithm, where each MNO and MVNO can cooperate with one or more MVNOs and MNOs, respectively. The performance of our proposed scheme is finally investigated by comparing it with various schemes and some useful conclusions are drawn