Financial Analysis of a Pico-Cellular Home Network Deployment

− The increasing demand for higher data rates in cellular networks has resulted in a trend to smaller cell sizes (femto cells) and pico-cellular hot spot coverage. In this paper the financial impact of pico-cellular home base station deployment in a macro-cellular network is explored. For increasing data rates, it becomes evident that current macro-cellular network deployment becomes less economically viable. It is shown that in urban areas a combination of publicly accessible home base stations, randomly deployed by the end user, and macro-cells for area coverage, deployed by an operator, can result in significant reductions (up to 70% in the investigated scenario) of the total annual network costs compared to a pure macro-cellular network. Keywords − Financial analysis, network deployment, CapEx, OpEx, hot-spot coverage, pico-cells, macro-cells.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Holger Claussen, Lester T. W. Ho, Louis G. Samuel
• Keywords: Communications, Home Base Stations, ICC 2007, Macro-cellular Network, Network Deployment