A Ruin Theoretic Design Approach for Wireless Cellular Network Sharing with Facilities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a ruin-theoretic framework to evaluate wireless network sharing arrangements between large facilities and traditional operators, considering both physical and financial constraints for sustainable service provision.

Contribution

It proposes a novel socio-technical evaluation framework based on ruin theory to assess the viability of facility-based network sharing arrangements.

Findings

The framework quantifies the probability of revenue deficit in sharing arrangements.

It provides guidance for designing leasing and service agreements.

The approach accounts for both physical resource and financial constraints.

Abstract

With the rise of cheap small-cells in wireless cellular networks, there are new opportunities for third party providers to service local regions via sharing arrangements with traditional operators. In fact, such arrangements are highly desirable for large facilities---such as stadiums, universities, and mines---as they already need to cover property costs, and often have fibre backhaul and efficient power infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a new network sharing arrangement between large facilities and traditional operators. Our facility network sharing arrangement consists of two aspects: leasing of core network access and spectrum from traditional operators; and service agreements with users. Importantly, our incorporation of a user service agreement into the arrangement means that resource allocation must account for financial as well as physical resource constraints. This introduces a new non-trivial dimension into wireless network resource allocation, which requires a new evaluation framework---the data rate is no longer the only main performance metric. Moreover, despite clear economic incentives to adopt network sharing for facilities, a business case is lacking. As such, we develop a general socio-technical evaluation framework based on ruin-theory, where the key metric for the sharing arrangement is the probability that the facility has less than zero revenue surplus. We then use our framework to evaluate our facility network sharing arrangement, which offers guidance for leasing and service agreement negotiations, as well as design of the wireless network architecture, taking into account network revenue streams.