Cellular Network Without Borders: Exploring Settlement-Free Peering

In recent times, the wireless network market has received an influx of innovative technologies to cope up with the ever-growing data traffic demand and make efficient deployment and utilization of network resources. Despite that, cellular service and coverage in non-urban areas still remains largely unreliable. Providers predominantly set up roaming agreements to offer service to their customers in such regions where they have no coverage. These roaming services come with their own set of technical and operational constraints and limitations. As an alternative, we introduce Wireless Peering for cellular providers, a concept inspired by ISP peering in wireline networks. By facilitating settlement-free spectrum sharing, Wireless Peering allows providers to seamlessly extend their coverage to off-network regions, without any hardware modifications. Due to its software-defined nature, the model offers high scalability, cost-effectiveness and ease of deployment. In this paper, we detail the core ideas and operational framework of a Wireless Peering model with a particular emphasis on improving customer satisfaction and provider revenue gains. Simulation results using OpencellID data on real-life providers and customers across contiguous United States (US) exhibits significant improvements over roaming for both customers and providers.