Active LTE RAN Sharing with Partial Resource Reservation

Active RAN sharing is a promising way to reduce both Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX) for mobile (virtual) network operators. Partial resource reservation is a flexible active RAN sharing technique that allows each operator to be guaranteed a minimum share of resources whilst also having access to shared common resources on a first-come-first-served basis. This paper proposes a partial resource reservation scheme for Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, addressing both scheduler and admission control aspects. System-level simulation results show: compared to Full Reservation schemes, our proposed scheme can flexibly allocate the shared resources to operators according to their actual traffic loads and traffic priorities, and thus, increase the spectrum utilization and the revenue of the network owner; compared to Complete Sharing scheme, it can provide minimum guaranteed performance for each operator.