Beamforming and Power Control for Wireless Network Virtualization in Uplink MIMO Systems

We consider wireless network virtualization (WNV) in an uplink multiple-input multiple-output system, where multiple service providers (SPs) operate in virtually isolated networks managed by an infrastructure provider (InP) that owns the communication equipment. Service isolation is achieved at the physical layer by exploiting a large number of antennas at the base stations. We formulate this WNV as a non-convex optimization problem for the InP, jointly considering the uplink receive beamforming at the BS and the transmit power of the SPs' subscribing user devices. We decompose the problem into two subproblems and derive closed-form solutions to both. We then adopt an alternating optimization approach to combine the closed-form solutions to solve the original problem. Our simulation results show that the proposed method provides strong service isolation among the SPs while retaining efficiency similar to or better than centralized beamforming without virtualization, and it substantially outperforms traditional WNV with strict resource separation.