At the University of Pittsburgh, the research has focused on taking a market perspective on the negotiations between the entities that participate in a virtualized wireless network. For this purpose, we have modeled a matching market with the objective of creating partnerships between Service Providers and an intermediate entity (or middleman) known as the Virtual Network Builder. After partnerships are established, the Virtual Network Builder learns the demand of its customers and its duty is to assemble the appropriate set of resources to fulfill their demand. For this purpose, the Virtual Network Builders have access to a resource pool, which is populated by the Resource Providers.
In this light, the outcome of the matching market is not only a set of VNB - SP partnerships; it is also the final demand for virtualized resources. The added benefit of this approach is the possibility to explore factors that may influence the creation of partnerships and thus the resulting resource demand.
At Virginia Tech, the work has focused into finding optimal resource allocation mechanisms that are suitable for virtualized environments.
The idea behind the collaborative work is to pair the demand resulting from the matching process with an optimal resource allocation mechanism. The objective of this approach is to explore the benefits of incorporating a broker in the system, how the role of this intermediary could be fulfilled and how that translates into the final resource assignment process. This method allows us to take a balanced perspective between market and technical approaches to the allocation of spectrum resources.