Chien, Hsu-TungLin, Ying-DarChang, Hsien-WenLai, Chia-Lin2019-09-112019-09-112018-12Chien, H.T., Lin,Y. D., Chang, H. W., Lai, C. L. (2018). Multi-Operator Fairness in Transparent RAN Sharing by Soft-Partition With Blocking and Dropping Mechanism. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 67(12) , pp. 11597-11605.0018-9545https://hdl.handle.net/10016/28784Radio access network (RAN) sharing has attracted significant attention from telecom operators as a means of accommodating data surges. However, current mechanisms for RAN sharing ignore the fairness issue among operators, and hence the RAN may be under- or over-utilized. Furthermore, the fairness among different operators cannot be guaranteed, since the RAN resources are distributed on a first come, first served basis. Accordingly, the present study proposes a “soft-partition with blocking and dropping” (SBD) mechanism that offers inter-operator fairness using a “soft-partition” approach. In particular, the operator subscribers are permitted to overuse the resources specified in the predefined service-level-agreement when the shared RAN is under-utilized, but are blocked (or even dropped) when the RAN is over-utilized. The simulation results show that SBD achieves an inter-operator fairness of 0.997, which is higher than that of both a hard-partition approach (0.98) and a no-partition approach (0.6) while maintaining a shared RAN utilization rate of 98%. Furthermore, SBD reduces the blocking rate from 35% (hard partition approach) to almost 0%, whereas controlling the dropping rate at 5%. Notably, the dropping rate can be reduced to almost 0% using a newly proposed bandwidth scale down procedure.13eng© 2018 IEEE.Radio access network (RAN)RAN sharingSoft partitionFairnessUtilizationBlocking rateDropping rateresearch articleTelecomunicacioneshttps://doi.org/10.1109/TVT.2018.2872042open access12IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology67