High capacity indoor and hotspot wireless systems in shared spectrum: a techno-economic analysis

Predictions for wireless and mobile Internet access suggest an exponential traffic increase, particularly in in-building 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 internetwork 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 impairments. Limited coordination, on the other hand, causes harmful interference between operators, which in turn will require even denser networks. In this article, we propose a techno-economic analysis framework for investigating and comparing indoor operator strategies. 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 to compare different operator strategies. Finally, we suggest areas for future research.