Perspectives for resource sharing in 5G networks

The era of 5G networks is approaching fast and its commercialization is planned for 2020. However, there are still numerous aspects that need to be solved and standardized before an average end-user can benefit from them on a daily basis. The 5G technology is supposed to be faster, provide services of higher quality, and better address the evolving needs of customers. As a consequence, 5th generation network needs to be implemented with efficiency and flexibility in mind, and thus, it fits well with the concepts of virtualization which enable sharing of physical resources among different operators, services, and applications. In this paper, we present an overview of these concepts, resulting from our discussions, i.e. between academic researchers and active network architects, and we describe the operation of a model that is most likely to emerge in such a complex network environment.