On performance analysis of multioperator RAN sharing for mobile network operators

Abstract

Enhancing the coverage and eliminating the poor performance is key to balance end-user experience and future network investments for mobile network operators (MNOs). Although vast amounts of infrastructure investments are provided by MNOs, there are still coverage and capacity planning problems at remote locations. This is because, in most cases, the population density and return-of-investments are low in those areas. In this paper, radio access network (RAN) sharing paradigm is utilized on experimental sites in Turkey to accommodate user equipment of multiple network operators under the same cell sites. We first investigate characteristics, benefits, and limitations of two different RAN sharing deployment scenarios. Then, a city-wide experimental RAN sharing study is conducted on live long-term evolution (LTE) networks between two MNOs in Turkey. Through experimental tests, we show overall performance gains of enabling RAN sharing feature in terms of observing various key performance indicators that are obtained from shared base stations. Our experimental results demonstrate that both downlink and uplink average user throughput values increased by 17.8% and 42.85%, respectively. After RAN sharing was enabled between MNOs, increase in the number of user equipment due to higher 4G coverage yielded a higher number of interradio access technology (inter-RAT) handover attempts. This caused inter-RAT handover out success rate to decrease by 70.66%. Intrafrequency handover out success rate, which indicates if the subscriber is using the same RAT type, increased by 358.33% and service drop rates dropped by 86.1%, respectively, after RAN sharing was enabled. Finally, we discuss and summarize the main takeaways of the outcome of the considered large-scale RAN sharing experiments.