Operator and radio resource sharing in multi-carrier environments

Today's mobile networks prevent users from freely accessing all available networks. Instead, seamless network composition could present a win-win situation for both users and operators. Users can gain better quality of service with more resources to choose from, while each individual operator can provision lesser bandwidth since resources can be shared during times of peak demand. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of operator cooperation using real trace data of cellular data access. We leverage the difference in burstiness at small timescales across network providers to shed the peak usage of one operator on to another. Our results show that even when an operator provisions network capacity below the peak load, cooperation with other network providers can help maintain quality of service for most sessions. In addition, we investigate the performance delivered by various kinds of cellular data cards. Our results confirm that WiFi 802.11b/g consistently delivers superior performance compared to 3G. It will take the next generation 4G technologies such as LTE to deliver end-user performance comparable to widely-deployed 802.11 networks.