On Fairness in Network Sharing

Network Sharing (NS) has gained increasing interest for Mobile Operators (MOs) because of the high investment costs of 5G combined with a period of low return of investment. The benefits that NS can offer include reduced capital and operational expenditures, because of fewer equipment, and lower energy consumption, possibly combined with higher network resiliency. While these aspects have been investigated in the literature, in those works more attention was paid to the overall benefits, disregarding asymmetries between the involved MOs. In this paper we address the issue of fairness in sharing network infrastructure among MOs and we introduce a Fair Cooperative Network Sharing (FCNS) framework that dynamically offloads traffic among co-located BSs owned by different MOs with two primary objectives: distributing active operational time more equitably between BSs in a pair, and significantly decreasing the failure rate of BS pairs. Simulation results based on empirical mobile traffic data demonstrate that the proposed FCNS framework effectively balances the BS active time across operators. In addition, FCNS achieves energy savings of up to 38% for each MO within a BS pair and reduces the failure rate by approximately 20%. These findings highlight the potential of cooperative network sharing as a feasible and sustainable solution for resilient 5G deployments.