WNV-RA: Wireless Network Virtualization Empowered Resource Allocation in Delay-Sensitivity Airborne Tactical Networks

Airborne tactical networks (ATN) play a pivotal role in enabling information sharing between manned and unmanned military aircrafts. The design of effective ATNs faces two significant challenges: the network ossification problem and the complexity associated with managing heterogeneous resources. Wireless network virtualization provides a practical solution for the first challenge by abstracting, isolating, and sharing wireless resources among different entities. Flexible and scalable virtual request embedding (VRE) algorithms have the potential ability to address the other challenge. However, existing VRE algorithms are not suitable for the virtualization of an ATN because they do not adequately consider key factors such as global interference, reliability and delay-sensitive information sharing in the air-battlefield context. In this paper, we propose an analytical framework of joint wireless network virtualization and resource allocation in the context of an ATN. This framework ensures coordination between physical node and link resources for the VRE. Based on the proposed framework, we design a centralized embedding mechanism that maps available physical resources to served users by constructing a directed resource topology and designing wireless link scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, we design two VRE algorithms that account for two types of delay sensitivity: transmission time and waiting time, depending on whether virtual requests are split or not. Through simulations, we validate the effectiveness of our algorithms and analyze the impact of key system parameters on the delay performance.