Bankruptcy Problem in Network Sharing: Fundamentals, Applications and Challenges

Network sharing has already been adopted by mobile network operators as a reliable and effective countermeasure to the constantly increasing network cost. The introduction of 5G mobile communications is expected to revolutionize the telecommunications world. However, it also brings new challenges to network sharing, as new technologies (e.g., network virtualization, cloud architectures, and so on) and types of resources (e.g., computation and storage) come to the fore. Despite their inherent differences, the common characteristic of the emerging resources is that they are limited and, in many cases, insufficient to cover the rising traffic demands. In this article, we highlight the equivalence between the distribution of a limited number of resources and the bankruptcy problem, where the demands of different agents over a given commodity exceed its total quantity. In particular, i) we review the fundamentals and existing solutions of the bankruptcy problem; ii) we provide potential applications of this problem in mobile network sharing; and iii) we list challenges and open issues for the application of the bankruptcy game in the mobile communications domain. The main goal of our work is to identify new research lines that will foster 5G network sharing.