Techno-Economics of Small Cell Networks: The AWARE Project

Abstract : The rapidly growing bandwidth demand for mobile internet and mobile broadband applications is currently triggering the development of novel approaches to increase the capacity of the macro infrastructure of current mobile networks. Among the available options, increasing the spatial density of mobile sites is of specific interest, while at the same time the resulting new paradigm of user-provided small cell networks requires to redefine the traditional roles and relationships of network operators and end customers to a large extent. The COMET/CELTIC project AWARE (Aggregation of Wireless Access Resources) addresses corresponding open issues from a dedicated technoeconomic perspective. This paper outlines the basic approach taken by AWARE, describes the resulting "prosumer" model and surveys the results of related game-theoretic analysis.