Abstract
In this article, we evaluate the economic gains of a joint deployment of femtocells and macrocells for the provision of long-term evolution mobile broadband services in urban environments. Frequency bands of 2.6 GHz and 900 MHz are analyzed and different parameters related to the business model are considered for a 30% market share operator. Results show important benefits for the case where the service is based on a closed subscriber group access to the femtocells, which the operator does not subsidy: up to 74% for small bandwidth (5 MHz). A business model approach based on open subscriber group access to the femtocell can also be interesting for the operator, although in this case, wholesale subscriber loop costs and femtocells cost are taken into account; thus, savings slightly decrease compared to the previous case. In addition, initial savings are reduced in 8–20% if the operator’s existing sites are reused.
Highlights
Motivation Mobile traffic demand has substantially grown over the last years partially because of commercial launch of flat rates
We provide an assessment of the economic gains, in terms of total network-related cost savings, provided by the joint deployment of femtocells and macrocells for mobile broadband services with longterm evolution (LTE) technology against an exclusive macrocell deployment
Conclusions and future work A techno-economic methodology has been applied to femtocell deployment in order to assess the economic gains provided by the joint deployment of macrocells and femtocells in the provision of mobile broadband services
Summary
Motivation Mobile traffic demand has substantially grown over the last years partially because of commercial launch of flat rates. New mobile communication systems must fulfill higher average and cell-edge user throughput requirements, while at the same time average revenues per user are continually decreasing. The key success of future wireless systems will be the provision of mobile broadband access but at lower costs-per-bit for the operators than previous systems [1]. Mobile traffic growth has been fulfilled by the following methods: increasing the available spectrum for mobile communications, increasing the number of base stations or through the improvement of radio access technologies, i.e., increasing spectral efficiency. The so-called refarming process has been carried out in order to increase the available spectrum for the operators. Spectrum is a scarce resource, and the available spectrum for mobile communication cannot be extended as much as it would be desirable.
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