Abstract-To accommodate the ever-growing traffic load and bandwidth demand generated by mobile users, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) need to frequently invest in high spectral efficiency technologies and increase their hold of spectrum resources; MNOs have then to weigh between building individual networks or entering into network and spectrum sharing agreements. We address here the problem of Radio Access Network (RAN) and spectrum sharing in 4G mobile networks by focusing on a case when multiple MNOs plan to deploy small cell Base Stations in a geographical area in order to upgrade their existing network infrastructure. We propose two cooperative game models (with and without transferable utility) to address the proposed problem: for given network (user throughput, MNO market and spectrum shares) and economic (coalition cost, mobile data pricing model) settings, the proposed models output a cost division policy that guarantees coalition (sharing agreement) stability.

Abstract-

The decoupling of infrastructure from services, which has been so far a mainstream paradigm in the computational and storage domain, is now becoming a paradigm also for mobile networks. Indeed, 5G must provide a variety of services with very diverse requirements, such as throughput, latency, or reliability, and decoupling infrastructure from service provisioning allows to deal with such heterogeneity. In this context, a new business model, involving two different stakeholders, Infrastructure Providers and Service Providers, has emerged. Besides addressing the technical issues, it is also important to study the economic feasibility and behavior of such new paradigm and the techno-economic interactions among the different stakeholders that play different roles in the mobile network market. In this paper, we propose a multi-leader multi-follower variant of the Stackelberg game to model the considered environment. The proposed model is then fed with realistic data and used to analyze the system behavior and the impact of the technological features of the stakeholders on their competitiveness.

Abstract-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.