Sharing the small cells for energy efficient networking: How much does it cost?

The explosive data traffic demands stress the need for additional capacity in cellular systems, which can be achieved through the exploitation of Small Cells (SCs). However, the deployment of SCs implies higher energy consumption in the network, something that translates into higher financial cost for the operators. To that end, the existence of a third party that provides a common SC infrastructure for the operators has been introduced as an appealing "green" solution, raising though important issues with regard to the cost sharing for the operators. In this paper, we effectively address this issue by proposing an accurate cost model for the SCs and employing different state-of-the-art techniques to share this cost. In addition, taking into account the impact of the traffic pattern on this cost, we propose a novel hybrid cost sharing policy that provides a fair outcome for the operators. Our results highlight the potential energy efficiency gains in the network along with different ways of sharing the cost of the deployed SCs.