Open or close: On the sharing of femtocells

Abstract

The femtocell is an enabling technology to handle exponentially increasing wireless data traffic. Despite extensive attentions paid to resource control, e.g., power control and load balancing in femtocell networks, the success largely depends on whether operators and users accept this technology or not. In this paper, we study the economic aspects of femtocell services with game theoretic models between providers and/or users. We consider three services: users can access only macro BSs (mobile-only), or open/exclusively use their femto BS (open or closed-femto). The main messages include: 1) it is better off for the operator to provide just the open-femto service than a mix of closed and open-femto services; 2) two polices of allowing or blocking the access of mobile-only users to open femto BS are not significantly differentiated in the revenue.