Information-Centric Wireless Networks with Virtualization and D2D Communications

Wireless network virtualization and information-centric networking (ICN) are two promising technologies for next generation wireless networks. Although some excellent works have focused on these two technologies, device-to-device (D2D) communications have not beeen investigated in information-centric virtualized cellular networks. Meanwhile, content caching in mobile devices has attracted great attentions due to the saved backhaul consumption or reduced transmission latency in D2D-assisted cellular networks. However, when it comes to the multi-operator scenario, the direct content sharing between different operators via D2D communications is typically infeasible. In this article, we propose a novel information-centric virtualized cellular network framework with D2D communications, enabling not only content caching in the air, but also inter-operator content sharing between mobile devices. Moreover, we describe the key components in the proposed framework, and present the interactions among them. In addition, we incorporate and formulate the content caching strategies in resource allocation optimization, to maximize the total utility of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) through caching popular contents in mobile devices. Simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and scheme with different system parameters.