In a typical communications network such as a radio communications network, wireless terminals, also known as mobile stations and/or user equipments (UEs), communicate via a Radio Access Network (RAN) to one or more core networks. The RAN covers a geographical area which is divided into cell areas, with each cell area being served by a base station, e.g., a radio base station (RBS), which in some networks may also be called, for example, a “NodeB” or “eNodeB”. A cell is a geographical area where radio coverage is provided by the radio base station at a base station site or an antenna site in case the antenna and the radio base station are not collocated. Each cell is identified by an identity within the local radio area, which is broadcast in the cell. Another identity identifying the cell uniquely in the whole mobile network is also broadcasted in the cell. The base stations communicate over the air interface operating on radio frequencies with the user equipments within range of the base stations.
In some versions of the RAN, several base stations are typically connected, e.g., by landlines or microwave, to a controller node, such as a radio network controller (RNC) or a base station controller (BSC), which supervises and coordinates various activities of the plural base stations connected thereto. The RNCs are typically connected to one or more core networks.
A Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile communication system, which evolved from the second generation (2G) Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). The UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) is essentially a RAN using Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and/or High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) for user equipments. In a forum known as the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), telecommunications suppliers propose and agree upon standards for e.g. third generation networks and further generations, and investigate enhanced data rate and radio capacity.
Specifications for the Evolved Packet System (EPS) have been completed within the 3GPP and this work continues in the coming 3GPP releases. The EPS comprises the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN), also known as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio access, and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), also known as System Architecture Evolution (SAE) core network. E-UTRAN/LTE is a variant of a 3GPP radio access technology wherein the radio base stations are directly connected to the EPC core network rather than to RNCs. In general, in E-UTRAN/LTE the functions of a RNC are distributed between the radio base stations, e.g., eNodeBs in LTE, and the core network. As such, the RAN of an EPS has an essentially “flat” architecture comprising radio base stations without reporting to RNCs.
There are two common ways of defining and signaling desired resource demands to a bottleneck in a communications network in for example a core network such as a packet network. A bottleneck being a location in the communications network where a single or limited number of components or resources affects capacity or performance of the communication network.
A first common way is to pre-signal/pre-configure the desired resource sharing rules for a given traffic aggregate, such as a flow or a bearer, to a bottleneck node prior the arrival of the actual traffic. The bottleneck node then implements the handling of the traffic aggregates based on these sharing rules, e.g. uses scheduling to realize the desired resource sharing. Examples for this pre-signaling/pre-configuration method are e.g. the bearer concept of 3GPP [3GPP TS 23.401 v12.4.0], SIRIG [3GPP TS 23.060 section 5.3.5.3, v12.4.0], or Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) [RFC2205]. An example scheduling algorithm for this method, implementing the 3GPP bearer concept at an LTE eNB, may be found in Wang Min, Jonas Pettersson, Ylva Timner, Stefan Wanstedt and Magnus Hurd, Efficient QoS over LTE—a Scheduler Centric Approach. Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), 2012 IEEE 23rd International Symposium. Another example of this is to base the resource sharing on Service Value as described in Service Value Oriented Radio Resource Allocation, WO2013085437.
A second common way is to mark packets with priority—this would give more resources to higher prio flows, or with drop precedence, which marks the relative importance of the packets compared to each other. Packets of higher drop precedence are to be dropped before packets of lower drop precedence. An example for such method is DiffSery Assured Forwarding (AF) within a given class [RFC2597]. Also such a method with several drop precedence levels are defined in a Per-Bearer Multi Level Profiling, EP2663037.
It is an open issue how to signal service policies to different bottlenecks of resources, including both transport bottlenecks and radio links. The term ‘service policy’ or policy in this document denotes instructions on how the available resources at a packet scheduler shall distribute the available, primarily transmission, resources among the packets of various packet flows arriving to the scheduler. The term ‘resource sharing policies’ is used in the same meaning. In the case of radio links, the service policy also needs to define how a terminal dependent radio channel overhead should affect the resource sharing. Such a scheme for signaling is preferably simple, versatile and fast adapts to the actual congestion situation.
Resource sharing may also be implemented in a virtual networking setting. Virtual networking used herein means as follows:                A Physical Network Operator (PNO) owns and operates a physical network infrastructure including nodes such as switches, routers or any other packet/frame/cell switching devices, and links.        The PNO slices its network resources and/or nodes among multiple Virtual Network Operators (VNO). The VNOs operate their own network, which, potentially only in part, may be implemented over one slice of the PNO's network. The PNO physical owns a network and several other operators, VNOs, buy a contract from PNO to use his physical network. Based on this the PNO lets the VNOs use his network based on the contract. A VNO might be using only a part of the PNO's network.        
And resource sharing in virtual networking relates to how to share PNO's resources among the VNOs.
Note that it may be that a VNO owns some physical infrastructure as well and combines it with the virtual resources it receives from the PNO into a unified network. In this case resource sharing among the VNOs is handled only in the part obtained from the PNO.
Examples of virtual networking implemented today include                Ethernet Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN) enabling to run multiple Local Area Networks (LAN) over a single physical infrastructure.        L2 or L3 Virtual Private Networks (VPN) enabling several clients to use network resources of a transport provider.        Today's cloud networking uses virtual networking to a very large extent—often several layers, not just two as in the explanation above.        A final, but equally interesting case is that of a mobile operators' roaming scenario. In this case, the home and visited operators are in a situation very similar to the VNO and PNO, respectively. The home operator uses the visited operator's resources to provide services to a customer of the home operator and both of the operators have resource sharing policies.        
Any technique to control routing and forwarding falls into scope of resource sharing in virtual networking. For example,                The PNO may provide full VPN services to the VNOs. In this case path selection within the slice is entirely controlled by the PNO—the VNO essentially sees it as a big link or node.        The PNO may slice a forwarding table memory of the physical switches among the VNOs and provide access to each slice to its correspondent VNO. In this case VNOs may govern how forwarding happens within their slice of the forwarding table memory.        
There are a few existing solutions to resource sharing in virtual networking.                One method, which is typically used, is to allocate guaranteed resources to VNOs. For example a first VNO and a second VNO may have 10 Gbit/s and 20 Gbits/s allocated, respectively on every link of the PNO. The PNO applies per/VNO queues to provide the aforementioned amount and to protect one VNO from the other.        Another method is not to apply any special queuing inside the PNO, but to limit VNOs at the edge and thereby provide protection against one VNO taking too much resources.        A third method also typically used is to assign the VNOs' traffic into traffic classes based on their Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and do edge policing on a per class/per VNO basis. Inside the PNO network the traffic classes are handled by e.g., priority queuing and no distinction is made among the VNOs.        The above may be combined with policing and shaping inside the network nodes on a per VNO basis.        
Existing solutions may be grouped into classes                A first class solves the resource sharing problem by assigning guaranteed resources to VNOs. This means that resources not used by a VNO cannot be utilized by another VNO. This is not good business for the PNO, because any statistical multiplexing gains are lost. While this type of resource sharing is good when absolute guarantees are a must, such as for real-time traffic, this type wastes resources for less demanding, more elastic or adaptive traffic.        A second class of solutions maintains per VNO queues, or one queue per VNO and service class. This class is able to achieve fine grained resource sharing among VNOs by applying various queuing disciplines, shapers and policers. The drawback of this class is its limited scalability and flexibility. Networking gear usually has a limited amount of queues limiting the number of VNOs. Changing the resource sharing policy may require changes to the queuing policy. For example to provide a combination of priority and proportional weighted sharing requires a queuing mechanism supporting such sharing, which is not typically available.        A third class does not differentiate between traffic of different VNOs inside the network of the PNO, but only at the edges. This results in (largely) equal resource sharing with fully taking advantage of statistical multiplexing. Differentiation between VNOs, applying the policy of the PNO, is attempted by shaping/policing at the edges. This obviously has serious limitations, as any PNO policy on resource sharing may only be applied at the edge and since traffic conditions may be very different at an internal bottleneck the policy may not get realized there due to the fact that the bottleneck makes no differentiation. This class may be improved by introducing traffic classes and performing some performing edge policing and internal node queuing based on them. This allows rudimentary differentiation within the traffic of one VNO in addition to enhancing the differentiation between VNOs, by classifying more or less of their traffic as e.g., “high priority”. However, the traffic classes implemented inside the PNO network actually limits what kind of differentiation policy the VNOs can have among their clients.        
Sometimes a combination of the above solutions is used, such as providing a guaranteed rate (1st class) and filling the unused capacity with “best effort” traffic (3rd class). This is an improvement, but the combination only provides limited control over how the capacity used by the best effort part, admittedly the bulk of the capacity, is distributed among second packet networks such as VNOs. This results in a solution that is not flexible and uses the resources of a first packet network e.g. the network of the PNO, in a non-efficient manner.