| Summary: | Wireless access to the Internet is expected to be very valuable for both individuals and the society. However, advances in transmission technology alone may not be sufficient to support the anticipated demand for higher data rates and greater traffic volumes. Fortunately, a low cost means of increasing capacity is to match wireless infrastructures to the non-uniform spatial distribution of traffic. Multiple radio access standards and base station classes, having different cost and performance, could be combined to create a heterogeneous wireless access network which provides the required data rates and capacities where needed (or desired). In the case of a non-uniform spatial distribution of traffic, the traditional technical performance measures of coverage and capacity are no longer adequate for comparing the cost effectiveness of different network configurations. Therefore in this dissertation, we propose a general methodology to evaluate the total cost and capacity of heterogeneous networks. Moreover, a few promising capacity expansion paths, including multiple cellular standards as well as wireless local area network technologies, have been evaluated for urban scenarios. While results show that macro cellular systems are the most cost effective solution for a uniform spatial traffic distribution, a complementary hot spot layer is for non-uniform traffic distributions required even at a moderate average traffic density. The incremental cost, which is modest as compared to current revenues for operators, is shown to be quite insensitive to the choice of technology used in the hot spot layer. Moreover, if high data rates are demanded on the uplink, then dedicated indoor solutions are required. Which in turn implies that network providers should exploit existing broadband infrastructures to provide the required backhaul connectivity. In order to address non-urban scenarios, especially in sparsely populated areas, where there is insufficient revenue to support multiple independent networks, a multi-operator network sharing network architecture should be employed. This dissertation proposes a priority queuing method to achieve fair sharing of radio resources between operators in such an architecture. === QC 20100730
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