Impact of asymmetric transmission power on operator competition in shared spectrum

To maintain affordable access for the rapidly increasing mobile traffic, base station deployment has to be tailored to hot-spot areas and primarily indoors where facility owners, e.g., shopping malls or hotels, mostly provide wireless service. Since such local access providers (LAPs) do not have access to exclusive spectrum, one proposed option is sharing spectrum with other nearby LAPs, e.g. unlicensed or secondary spectrum. Due to limited or no coordination between the LAPs, they selfishly access the spectrum, causing harmful interference to the neighboring networks. Especially by increasing transmission power, one operator may attempt to improve its own throughput at the expense of its neighbors. In this paper, we explore the impact of power asymmetry on competition between LAPs. We model the competition between two networks with different maximum power constraints as a network-wide power control game. By analyzing the pure Nash equilibria, we find that a lower power (LP) network becomes more aggressive to overcome the inter-network interference. Due to the aggressive behavior, sharing spectrum can out-perform fixed spectrum split even for the LP network, provided that the power asymmetry is below a certain limit. On the other hand, a higher power (HP) network is mainly affected by its own “self-interference” so that it has little incentive to employ complicated inter-operator interference management schemes. In addition, we demonstrate that the power asymmetry limit strongly depends on the inter-network propagation conditions, e.g., inter-building distance or building penetration loss.