Techno-Economical Viability of Deployment Strategies for Cellular-Relaying Networks

The ability of an operator to respond to changes in demand by incrementally deploying additional network infrastructure is essential. This paper presents a method for evaluating and comparing the economic viability of incremental deployment strategies given a limited initial investment budget. Any strategy is seen as a sequence of deployment decisions. The time-dynamic relation between service quality and demand is taken into account via the limited investment budget (cash flow analysis), while the focus is maintained on the technical properties of the network. As an example, the economic viability of a ID cellular-relaying network is analyzed under greedy deployment strategies. In order for the cellular-relaying solution to be viable, we show that the maximum allowed relay cost decreases with the investment budget.