Business model requirements and challenges in the mobile telecommunication sector

The telecommunications business is undergoing a critical revolution, driven by innovative technologies, globalization, and deregulation. Cellular networks and telecommunications bring radical changes to the way telecom businesses are conducted. Globalization, on the other hand, is tearing down legacy barriers and forcing monopolistic national carriers to compete internationally. Moreover, the noticeable progress of many countries towards deregulation coupled with liberalization is significantly increasing telecom market power and allowing severe competition. The implications of this transition have changed the business rules of the telecom industry. In addition, entrants into the cellular industry have had severe difficulties due to inexistent or weak Business Models (BMs). Designing a BM for a mobile network operator is complex and requires multiple actors to balance different and often conflicting design requirements. Hence, there is a need to enhance operators’ ability in determining what constitutes the most viable business model to meet their strategic objectives within this turbulent environment. In this paper, the authors identify the main mobile BM dimensions along with their interdependencies and further analysis provides mobile network operators with insights to improve their business models in this new ‘boundary-less’ landscape

Advanced Positioning and Location based services in 4G Mobile-IP Radio Access Networks

2004 IEEE 15TH IEEE International Symposium on personal, indoor and mobile radio communications (PIMRC 2004), Barcelona, Spain, 5-8 september 2004.This paper proposes an evolved architecture from 3G networks to provide basic and advanced positioning methods for location based services in mobile IPv6-based radio access networks. We start analyzing current status of location-based services (i.e. LBS or LCS) and architectures in 3G networks as well as state-of-the-art research on LBS and mobile Internet. Next we set the requirements the solution should fulfill. We continue proposing the evolved architecture for support of basic and advanced positioning methods, using MIPv6 and HMIPv6 as mobility scenario for the mobile IPv6 based RAN, describing element's functions and changes from current approaches as well as description of the dynamic behavior. We complete the proposal with a bandwidth analysis of the signaling, identifying issues when planning implementation of LCS services in the network

Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks

Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders of magnitude, or even more, is possible.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.843

Dimming cellular networks

We propose a novel technique called dimming to improve the energy efficiency of cellular networks by reducing the capacity, services, and energy consumption of cells without turning off the cells. We define three basic methods to dim the network: coverage, frequency, and service dimming. We construct a multi-time period optimization problem to implement frequency dimming and extend it to implement both frequency and service dimming together. We illustrate the ability of dimming techniques to adapt the capacity and network services in proportion to the dynamic spatial and temporal load resulting in significant energy savings through numerical results for a sample network. ©2010 IEEE

Cell degradation detection based on an inter-cell approach

Fault management is a crucial part of cellular network management systems. The status of the base stations is usually monitored by well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs). The approaches for cell degradation detection are based on either intra-cell or inter-cell analysis of the KPIs. In intra-cell analysis, KPI profiles are built based on their local history data whereas in inter-cell analysis, KPIs of one cell are compared with the corresponding KPIs of the other cells. In this work, we argue in favor of the inter-cell approach and apply a degradation detection method that is able to detect a sleeping cell that could be difficult to observe using traditional intra-cell methods. We demonstrate its use for detecting emulated degradations among performance data recorded from a live LTE network. The method can be integrated in current systems because it can operate using existing KPIs without any major modification to the network infrastructure