Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
In the last few decades world has seen a quick transformation of cellular network service (CNS) with respect to a subscriber. In the beginning, we have seen a CNS was challenged to provide wide coverage which called for a good amount of investment on infrastructure. Following this challenge, CNS faced the challenge of retaining a subscriber profitably in a multi-operator regime. In the past, various CNS adopted a strategy or a combination of them to address this retention problem. Some of these strategies are related to attractive pricing through share infrastructure, differentiated pricing thereby relating pricing with Quality of Service (QoS), subscriber loyalty program, etc. All of them are very short living in terms of giving an edge over competitors as they are readily copied. In addition to the above fact, cellular network service has been viewed now as a commodity service with a little differentiation from service providers. This made the problem of subscriber retention all the more challenging and complex. This problem of CNS can be viewed as a service management problem (Bisdikian et al., 2010) where key focus will be managing the experience of a subscriber whenever subscribers avail the service. Each experience of subscriber needs to be viewed as an opportunity to build the loyalty by using different emotional parameters of subscribers. So to a CNS, key parameter should be Quality of Experience (QoE) rather than the QoS. In this setting, cellular network service can be viewed as stage and network infrastructure should be viewed as a prop to generate a personalized service and thus to control the QoE. The prop should be flexible, reliable enough to capture the context of personalization and provide it consistently to build on the quality experience. Now CNS is to achieve this with a very competitive price of service while meeting various technology constraints like availability of spectrum. In this context the prop i.e., network infrastructure needs to be planned in such a manner so that it can adapt the changes in subscribers’ pool. This makes the post deployment networking (Sadhukhan et al., 2009) planning more important. The post deployment network planning can be done with respect to a parameter or a combination of parameters. In this work, we have taken “cost effective usage of control channel” which has an impact on the QoE in terms of call admission and supporting the call on the move as a parameter to optimize. We have taken cost of handoff as a proxy variable to the “usage of control channel” thus representative variable for QoE.
The dynamic nature of subscriber’s profile makes the operation of cellular networks sub-optimal with the passage of time in terms of the handoff cost, and, hence, re-planning of networks needs to be done from time to time, with the existing deployment as a set of constraints (to protect investments). Post deployment planning plays a key role in optimizing the incremental capital investment vis-a-vis the targeted QoE for modern cellular networks (Demestichasetl, 1999; Saraydaretl, 2000, Demrikoletl, 2001).