State-of-the-art comparative cost modeling of heavily-loaded wireless heterogeneous networks

The motivation of this paper comes from the ongoing need of the telecommunications industry to respond to the revenue traffic decoupling trend. Besides innovation of data services in order to increase the average revenue per user, the ultimate goal of the mobile operators is to increase their cost and operational efficiency. For that purpose we developed “state-of-the-art” comparative analysis of the heterogeneous wireless networks in order to determine the most cost effective radio network deployment strategies as a function of excessive demand levels of up to 100 GB per user and month. We perform the modeling by consideration of the unit cost drivers relevant for the various base station classes which provide different coverage and high capacity performance, coming with the LTE-Advanced radio access technology or IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. The outcome of our cost model is the proper assessment of the total investment to cover and adequately serve the particular area of interest. The key finding is that the small cell solutions like pico, femto cells and Wi-Fi access points are more cost efficient when new macro base station sites need to be deployed or when very high demand levels need to be satisfied. In all other evaluated cases the importance of the spectrum size comes to the highest level together with the introduction of the LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation functionality.