Millimetre-Wave Spectrum Sharing in Future Mobile Networks : Techno-Economic Analysis

Abstract: Mobile operators passed through many phases in the market over the last several years, since the beginning of mobile broadband services. When the first smart phone was introduced in 2007, it caused a huge increase in the traffic and the users demand kept on increasing. This exponential growth has led to a severe shortage in the available capacity which caused that mobile users don’t have their promised quality of service and coverage. Operators began to put different scenarios for the next-generation mobile networks, putting in consideration the expected increase in the number of users along with their high demand.As a new proposed solution to the scarcity of empty spectrum slots, operating in higher frequency bands (noted as mmwave) emerged as a solution that will provide larger bandwidths with lower prices for the license. Mmwave will provide users with high data rates but on the other hand, has a low penetration rate that can be fixed by increasing the base stations. Another technique for the operators to follow is that they share their own spectrum with each other, by changing the classic way of exploiting the spectrum which proved a low efficiency and high cost, operators can increase their spectrum and coverage with lower cost.To get a clear understanding of how the operators will decide their future strategies, a technical analysis of the new strategies will not be enough, a technical one also will make it clearer and will help the operators in making the decision. The objective of this thesis is to perform a Techno-Economic analysis to get a full image of the system performance. Our system will consist of 2 operators working in mmwave band with antennas equipped with directional beamforming and the base station transmitters will consist of small cells serving outdoor users only. The main question we want to answer is what will be the effect of decreasing the beamwidth on the system performance and when the operators will need to share their spectrum with each other. The performance evaluation will be based on measuring the downlink achievable rate. As we will be performing an economical evaluation, the number of base stations required in each strategy will be an important parameter to evaluate its economic feasibility and cost savings. The different scenarios will include variations of the beamwidth and coordination between the operators with an objective of seeking the best performance along with cost savings. The results should give us a clear look on how the operators will decide for a certain strategy depending on downlink data rate as a KPI and the number of deployed base stations as a limiting factor.