  Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is expected to enable a number of new
services and applications in future mobile networks and has attracted
significant research interest over the last few years. Remarkably, little
attention has been placed on the issue of D2D communication for users belonging
to different operators. In this paper, we focus on this aspect for D2D users
that belong to different tenants (virtual network operators), assuming
virtualized and programmable future 5G wireless networks. Under the assumption
of a cross-tenant orchestrator, we show that significant gains can be achieved
in terms of network performance by optimizing resource sharing from the
different tenants, i.e., slices of the substrate physical network topology. To
this end, a sum-rate optimization framework is proposed for optimal sharing of
the virtualized resources. Via a wide site of numerical investigations, we
prove the efficacy of the proposed solution and the achievable gains compared
to legacy approaches.
