Inter-Operator Infrastructure Sharing: Trade-offs and Market

TL;DR

This paper models infrastructure sharing among mobile network operators as a market, analyzing coverage, power consumption, and strategic buying/selling decisions using stochastic geometry, game theory, and optimization techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive market model for infrastructure sharing, combining stochastic geometry, game theory, and optimization to analyze trade-offs and strategic behaviors.

Findings

Coverage probability saturates at high interference levels.

Optimal buyer strategy uses greedy fractional knapsack algorithm.

Power consumption is a piecewise linear and convex function.

Abstract

We model the problem of infrastructure sharing among mobile network operators (MNOs) as a multiple-seller single-buyer market where the MNOs are able to share their own base stations (BSs) with each other. First, we use techniques from stochastic geometry to find the coverage probability of the infrastructure sharing system and analyze the trade-off between increasing the transmit power of a BS and the BS intensity of a buyer MNO required to achieve a given quality-of-service (QoS) in terms of the coverage probability. We also analyze the power consumption of the network per unit area (i.e., areal power consumption) and show that it is a piecewise continuous function composed of a linear and a convex functions. We show that when the transmit power of the BSs and/or the BS intensity of a network increases, the system becomes interference limited and the coverage probability tends to saturate at a certain value. As such, when the required QoS is set above this bound, an MNO can improve its coverage by buying infrastructure from other MNOs. Subsequently, we analyze the strategy of a buyer MNO on choosing how many MNOs and which MNOs to buy the infrastructure from. The optimal strategy of the buyer is given by greedy fractional knapsack algorithm. On the sellers' side, the pricing and the fraction of infrastructure to be sold are formulated using a Cournot oligopoly game.