Financial Analysis of a Pico-Cellular Home Network Deployment

The increasing demand for higher data rates in cellular networks has resulted in a trend to smaller cell sizes (femto cells) and pico-cellular hot spot coverage. In this paper the financial impact of pico-cellular home base station deployment in a macro-cellular network is explored. For increasing data rates, it becomes evident that current macro-cellular network deployment becomes less economically viable. It is shown that in urban areas a combination of publicly accessible home base stations, randomly deployed by the end user, and macro-cells for area coverage, deployed by an operator, can result in significant reductions (up to 70% in the investigated scenario) of the total annual network costs compared to a pure macro-cellular network.