On the economic aspects of downlink scheduling in DS-CDMA systems: Base-station density perspective

Wireless systems have evolved into supporting nonreal-time data services. However, as the data rates for the services increase, the number of base stations per service area needs to expand, which leads to a high degree of base-station density. On the other hand, the so-called best effort resource management has been extensively studied for nonreal-time data services. One example of such efforts can be found in packet scheduling. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic impact of the downlink scheduling in terms of the base-station density. To this end, equations that can calculate the base-station density for the given quality of service (QoS) requirements such as outage probabilities, average data rates, and target E_b/I_o were derived. Under specific QoS requirements on Rayleigh-fading channel environments, it is found that the one-by-one downlink scheduling (round-robin) requires about 50%-60% of the base stations required by the conventional simultaneous transmission. It was also found that this impact is almost the same as simply doubling the spectrum bandwidth for the simultaneous transmission. The base-station density is directly related to the infrastructure cost and thus may be translated into service prices. Therefore, the analysis in this paper provides a new insight into an economic aspect; how much the service prices for downloading the nonreal-time data would decrease with the introduction of packet scheduling in the code division multiple access downlink.