High Capacity Indoor & Hotspot Wireless System in Shared Spectrum - A Techno-Economic Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a techno-economic analysis framework for shared spectrum indoor wireless networks, comparing operator strategies and interference management to optimize capacity and costs.

Contribution

It introduces a refined cost model with inter-operator factors and demonstrates its use in comparing different spectrum sharing strategies.

Findings

Inter-operator cooperation improves performance but increases costs

Limited coordination leads to harmful interference and denser networks

The framework helps evaluate trade-offs between strategies

Abstract

Predictions for wireless and mobile Internet access suggest exponential traffic increase particularly in inbuilding environments. Non-traditional actors such as facility owners have a growing interest in deploying and operating their own indoor networks to fulfill the capacity demand. Such local operators will need spectrum sharing with neighboring networks because they are not likely to have their own dedicated spectrum. Management of inter-network interference then becomes a key issue for high capacity provision. Tight operator-wise cooperation provides superior performance, but at the expense of high infrastructure cost and business-related barriers. Limited coordination on the other hand causes harmful interference between operators which in turn will require even denser networks. In this paper, we propose a techno-economic analysis framework for investigating and comparing the strategies of the indoor operators. We refine a traditional network cost model by introducing new inter-operator cost factors. Then, we present a numerical example to demonstrate how the proposed framework can help us comparing different operator strategies. Finally, we suggest areas for future research.