TCO Planning Game for 5G Multitenant Virtualized Mobile BackHaul (V-MBH) Network

Raising density and ever-increasing traffic demand within future 5G Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) will result in huge deployment, expansion and operating costs for upcoming Mobile Backhaul (MBH) networks. Multitenancy and network slicing based on virtualized resources are promising solutions to satisfy MBH network greediness while reducing related expenditures. Nevertheless, there is no appropriate model that fairly distributes costs over multiple virtual operators, and also optimizes physical resource planning. In this article, we introduce a new model of 5G multitenant MBH costs (CapEx and OpEx). Then, we drive a novel pay-as-you-grow and optimization model called Virtual-Backhaul-as-a-Service (VBaaS) as a planning tool optimizing the Project Profit Margin (PPM) while considering the Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) and the yearly generated Return-on-Investment (ROI). We also formulate an MNO pricing game (MPG) for TCO optimization to calculate the optimal Pareto-Equilibrium pricing strategy for offered Tenant Service Instances (TSI). Finally, we compare CapEx, OpEx, TCO, ROI and PPM for a specific use-case known in the industry as CORD project using Traditional MBH (T-MBH) versus Virtualized MBH (V-MBH) as well as using randomized versus Pareto-Equilibrium pricing strategies. Numerical results show more than three times increase in network profitability using our proposed solutions compared with Traditional MBH (T-MBH).