How Operators Can Differentiate through Policies When Sharing Small Cells

Sharing mobile networks results in significant cost savings for operators, but limits competition due to loss of differentiation between operators. In this work we show that operators actually can differentiate even though they have to jointly take certain decisions, e.g., whether to activate or deactivate a shared small cell for energy efficiency purposes. The idea is to base the sharing agreement not on a fixed resource ratio, but to allow deviations from a more flexible baseline resource ratio that accommodate one operator's policy as long as the other operators' policies are not violated. We observe that activating additional small cells as a reaction to an increasing traffic demand can be delayed compared to the case with a strict resource ratio resulting in a significant energy saving.