Making Cellular Networks More Efficient By Roaming-in-Place

We propose Roaming-in-Place (RinP), a technique for dynamically sharing capacity across mobile network operators. RinP is a new form of infrastructure sharing that expands the traditional notion of roaming in cellular networks such that users may roam between operators with overlapping coverage areas based on load and performance conditions. Using simulation and small-scale experiments, we show that deploying RinP would allow operators to run their networks at higher utilization and provide users with higher availability and performance, while achieving 30–40% infrastructure savings in our typical evaluation scenarios. We present a design for RinP that can be incrementally deployed with modest changes to existing cellular infrastructure. We build a prototype RinP testbed, and show that our proposed design can be realized feasibly with modest changes to existing cellular infrastructure, requires no change to current protocol standards, and adds minimal latency overheads.