Extended Probabilistic Cost Model (EPCM): A Framework for Cost Estimation of Wireless Network Deployment in Rural Areas

This paper tackles a critical issue emerging when planning the deployment of a wireless network in rural regions: the cost estimation. Wireless Networks have usually been presented as a cost-effective solution to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban regions. But this assertion is too general and does not give an insight about the real estimation of the deployment cost of such an infrastructure. Providing such a cost estimation framework may help to avoid underestimation or overestimation of required resources since the budget is almost always limited in rural regions. This work extends the Probabilistic Cost Model (PCM) that has been proposed. This model does not take into account the difference in the costs of unexpected events. To extend the PCMfirst, a list of unexpected events that can occur when deploying Wireless Networks has been established. This list is based on data from past projects and a set of unexpected events that can occur. Afterwards, the standard deviation and the average have been computed for each unexpected event. The Poisson process has been therefore used to predict the number of unexpected events that may occur during the network deployment. This approach led to the proposal of a model that gives an estimation of the total cost of contingencies, which takes into account the probability that the total cost of unexpected events does not exceed a given contingency. The evaluation of the proposed model on a given dataset provided a good accuracy in the prediction of the cost induced by unexpected events.