The Urge to Merge: When Cellular Service Providers Pool Capacity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how infrastructure and spectrum sharing among cellular operators can significantly increase network capacity, using a stochastic geometry model and simulations, demonstrating that cooperation can quadruple capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-cell analytical model for sharing strategies and validates it with realistic simulations, showing substantial capacity gains from cooperation.

Findings

Sharing spectrum and base stations can quadruple capacity.

Cooperation strategies can double capacity per customer.

Analytical model aligns well with simulation results.

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.