Virtualization of spectrum resources for 5G networks

The next generation of mobile networks, 5G, is currently under development by the industry, academia and international standard organizations. The key drivers of 5G are to provide incomparable more capacity (1000×), extremely lower latency (sub-millisecond) and to accommodate ‘any’ type of user (e.g. machines) in the network. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies promise to bring an unprecedented level of flexibility in resource management. This paper presents a radio frequency spectrum management framework that is suitable to programmable 5G networks, under the overarching architecture of the 5G PPP COHERENT project. It also provides description of the recent advances and up-to-date initiatives for resource management in programmable 5G networks. The core contribution consists in the design of an SDN-enabled spectrum management application (SMA), and the related abstraction models that have been developed to enable flexible spectrum management. This paper demonstrates that suitable policy and topology abstraction models are key to spectrum management and sharing process.