Use cases and derived requirements for a reconfigurable mobile network

Mounting capital and operational expenditure and reducing revenue per bit is straining the resources of mobile communication network operators. The future mobile communication networks will have to be dynamic; to adapt and re-adapt to the prevailing network conditions to increase operational efficiency. This paper presents the various use cases for such a Reconfigurable Mobile Network (RMN). We believe that the best way of currently achieving this reconfigurability is via virtualization techniques. Virtualization has been touted as the main solution that will ease the revolution to the future Internet and possibly result in a greener and more efficient operation of the current Internet. This paper investigates whether the concept of network virtualization can be re-applied to a mobile operator network to create RMN. We present detailed use cases for a reconfigurable mobile network and discuss the derived requirements on the RMN infrastructure. We see that a number of requirements, such as absolute isolation, may be technically infeasible in the current end-to-end mobile network.