Improving Network Robustness via Cellular Infrastructure Sharing: An Empirical Study of Infrastructure Failure with All Cellular Operators in a City

Zhihan Fang, Guang Yang, Wenjun Lyu, Zhiqing Hong, Shuxin Zhong, Weijian Zuo, Yu Yang, Guang Wang, Desheng Zhang

Abstract: Individual cellular networks have been very robust to random cell tower failure due to redundant cell tower deployments. However, a large-scale clustered failure (e.g., due to fiber cut or cyber attacks) with multiple cell towers can lead to the loss of services of a cellular network. Recently, off-the-shelf smartphones can support multiple network standards, so cellular network infrastructure sharing is a promising direction to improve the service robustness under potential large-scale clustered cell tower failure. The existing work on cellular network robustness is usually limited to large-scale studies of individual networks or small-scale studies of multiple networks. In this work, we conduct the first investigation, to our knowledge, into the benefits of cross-network infrastructure sharing for enhancing robustness at a full cellular penetration rate. We design a new metric to quantify cellular network robustness with or without cross-network sharing under both random and clustered cell tower failures. We further study the impact of spatial dynamics on cellular network robustness.