Abstract
Increased usage in wireless communication has been observed in the last decades and it is expected to rise even more. Traditional spectrum allocation mechanism together with increasing demand for data transfers caused spectrum to become more congested. As a consequence, high pressure for its more effective usage emerges. Modern concept of heterogeneous networks with cognitive femtocells represents one of the promising solutions. Associated technical issues of heterogeneous networks have been discussed in many papers. However, economic aspects of femtocell deployment in network are still insufficiently analysed. This paper is devoted to economic aspects of operators’ behaviour in the macro-femto network but we also focus on technical issue of overall spectrum usage. For this purpose, the agent-based model of two-tier network was proposed. Results of simulation confirm significant influence of number of deployed femtocells and their location in the network on operators’ pricing strategies and their whole economic performance.
Highlights
With technological progress demand for frequency spectrum has been increasing for years
Drawbacks of closed mode are potential cross-tier and co-tier interferences and lower overall throughput compared to open mode
Available spectrum resources are dynamically leased by femtocell operators (FCOs) for fixed leasing price per resource block (RB) on the wholesale market and both macrocell operator (MCO) and FCOs provide services to mobile end-users on the retail market
Summary
With technological progress demand for frequency spectrum has been increasing for years It creates pressure on spectrum usage efficiency, which is relatively low. There have been many proposals for two-tier networks comprised of macrocells and femtocells. Such type of network offers benefits for users by increasing quality-of-service (QoS) and for macrocell operators by offloading their traffic. Coexistence of macrocell and femtocells is considered in three basic modes: open, closed and hybrid [5]. Negative aspects of open mode are potential degradation of QoS due to large number of users sharing limited sources, numerous handovers among femtocells or between femtocell and macrocell, and security issues. Hybrid mode provides relatively stable QoS for registered femtocell users
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