Applicable Cost Modeling of LTE-Advanced and IEEE 802.11ac based Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

In this paper, we propose applicable and comparative cost-capacity analysis of the heterogeneous wireless networks in order to determine the most cost effective radio network deployment strategies as a function of an extreme demand levels of even more than 100 GB per user and month. We perform the modeling by considering of the unit cost drivers relevant for the various base station classes which provide different coverage and high capacity performance, coming with the Long Term Evolution Release 10 (LTEAdvanced) radio access technology or IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. Considering different amounts of available bandwidth in the 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands, the key finding is that the small cell solutions like femto cells and Wi-Fi are more cost efficient when new macro base station sites need to be deployed or when very high demand levels need to be satisfied. In all other evaluated cases, the importance of the spectrum size comes to the highest level together with the introduction of the LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation functionality. Also, we evaluate the economic gains of a joint deployment of femto/Wi-Fi sites from one side and macrocells from other side. We determine that instead of investing in additional spectrum or deploying denser macro network, mobile operators could compensate the indoor wall penetration losses by deploying different number of femto sites per floor or user per femto site, for still satisfactory level of QoS. Keywords-Wireless Heterogeneous Networks; Cost modeling; LTE-Advanced; IEEE 802.11ac.