Cost-Effective Deployment for Fully-Decoupled Radio Access Networks: A Techno-economic Approach

With the development of the Internet of Everything (IoE), future 6G networks will face the challenge of massive terminal access. However, deploying substantial high-cost, full-function base stations will undoubtedly further increase the cost of mobile network deployment, making it difficult for mobile operators to afford it. In this paper, we tackle the problem of low-cost network deployment for fully-decoupled radio access network (FD-RAN) with personalized service for large-scale terminals. We first propose a techno-economic cost model (TECM) for FD-RAN deployment based on the techno-economic approach. Then, we further formulate a cost-minimization problem for decoupled network deployment. Based on the independence brought by uplink and downlink decoupling in FD-RANs, we decompose the original problem into separate subproblems for uplink and downlink network deployment. In the following, we propose a branch and cut based network deployment (BCND) algorithm to solve two decoupled deployment subproblems, respectively. Finally, simulation results show that FD-RANs have significant cost advantages when facing differentiated service demands, and the main factors affecting network cost are power consumption and rental costs.