The urge to merge: When cellular service providers pool capacity
- 1 June 2012
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- p. 5020-5025
- https://doi.org/10.1109/icc.2012.6363788
Abstract
As cellular networks are turning into a platform for ubiquitous data access, cellular operators are facing a severe data capacity crisis due to the exponential growth of traffic generated by mobile users. In this work, we investigate the benefits of sharing infrastructure and spectrum among two cellular operators. Specifically, we provide a multi-cell analytical model using stochastic geometry to identify the performance gain under different sharing strategies, which gives tractable and accurate results. To validate the performance using a realistic setting, we conduct extensive simulations for a multi-cell OFDMA system using real base station locations. Both analytical and simulation results show that even a simple cooperation strategy between two similar operators, where they share spectrum and base stations, roughly quadruples capacity as compared to the capacity of a single operator. This is equivalent to doubling the capacity per customer, providing a strong incentive for operators to cooperate, if not actually merge.Keywords
This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit:
- A Tractable Approach to Coverage and Rate in Cellular NetworksIEEE Transactions on Communications, 2011
- MOTAPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2011
- Weighted Sum-Rate Maximization in Multi-Cell Networks via Coordinated Scheduling and Discrete Power ControlIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2011
- Cooperation among wireless service providers: opportunity, challenge, and solution [Dynamic Spectrum ManagementIEEE Wireless Communications, 2010
- Downlink Radio Resource Allocation for Multi-Cell OFDMA SystemIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2006
- Cross-Layer Adaptive Techniques for Throughput Enhancement in Wireless OFDM-Based NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2006
- Rate control for communication networks: shadow prices, proportional fairness and stabilityJournal of the Operational Research Society, 1998