Flexible capacity sharing in multi-tenant wireless networks through fuzzy neural controllers

© 2017 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. The introduction of multi-tenancy in the Radio Access Network (RAN) is seen as a relevant capability of future 5G systems to support the challenging capacity requirements in a cost-effective way. Multi-tenancy brings in new challenges in the way how the RAN has to be managed and operated in order to provide the agreed service levels to each tenant and at the same time achieve an efficient utilization of the radio resources. This paper proposes a new solution for flexible capacity sharing among tenants based on a hybrid centralized/distributed Self- Organizing Network (SON) function to automatically adjust the Admission Control (AC) settings of the different cells. The proposed solution makes use of fuzzy neural controllers that provide intrinsic benefits in terms of dealing with the uncertainties of complex cellular scenarios and introducing the formulation of preferences and policies in the decision process. Together with the detailed description of the different components of the proposed solution, the paper presents an initial evaluation that provides sufficient insight into the potentials of the fuzzy neural hybrid SON to stimulate further and subsequent analysis.