  Software-defined networking (SDN) is the concept of decoupling the control
and data planes to create a flexible and agile network, assisted by a central
controller. However, the performance of SDN highly depends on the limitations
in the fronthaul which are inadequately discussed in the existing literature.
In this paper, a fronthaul-aware software-defined resource allocation mechanism
is proposed for 5G wireless networks with in-band wireless fronthaul
constraints. Considering the fronthaul capacity, the controller maximizes the
time-averaged network throughput by enforcing a coarse correlated equilibrium
(CCE) and incentivizing base stations (BSs) to locally optimize their decisions
to ensure mobile users' (MUs) quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. By
marrying tools from Lyapunov stochastic optimization and game theory, we
propose a two-timescale approach where the controller gives recommendations,
i.e., sub-carriers with low interference, in a long-timescale whereas BSs
schedule their own MUs and allocate the available resources in every time slot.
Numerical results show considerable throughput enhancements and delay
reductions over a non-SDN network baseline.
