Evaluating the performance of infrastructure sharing in mobile radio networks

This work considers the strategic situation which arises when Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) coexisting in a given geographical area have to decide whether to invest in new radio access technology and whether to share the investment (and the infrastructure) with other operators. We focus on heterogeneous networks (HetNet) where MNOs add a layer of small cells to their existing macro cells. We address such strategic scenario by proposing a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation of the infrastructure sharing problem which takes as input techno-economic parameters as the achievable throughput in different sharing configurations, the pricing models for the service offered to the end users and the expectations on the return on investment for the mobile operators, and returns as output the “best” infrastructure/investment sharing options for the MNOs. The proposed formulation is finally leveraged to analyze the dynamics involved in the infrastructure sharing process under different techno-economic conditions in realistic network scenarios.