Sharing network infrastructure is carried out by a few network operators in the world and is regarded as an effective means to accelerate the commercial 5G with seamless coverage and user experience guarantees but significantly reduced investment. Voice via IMS has been defined as the voice-bearing solution from 3rd-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 5. Release 15 pointed out that 5G still adopts the IMS-based voice service architecture. In such a background, and in the process of global 5G network evolution from non-stand-alone (NSA) to stand-alone (SA), how to bear 5G voice services in the sharing network infrastructure has quite a few technical options. This paper investigates the 5G access network sharing technical solutions and presents the voice bearer technology under different new radio (NR) evolution stages. Analysis was performed for the different stages of voice handover. Performance results from field tests are provided to verify the feasibility of the solution, and performance analysis such as end-to-end call setup delay was also carried out. From the theoretical and practical analysis, the voice over long-term evolution (VoLTE) non-back-to-home solution has a relatively short access delay in the NSA sharing stage; EPS fallback based on either handover or redirection introduces a large time delay, so EPS fallback can only be used as a transition solution in the early stage of SA sharing deployment; voice over new radio (VoNR) has the lowest access time delay and the simplest implementation solution, so it is the final voice solution for 5G SA sharing network. The comparison of different voice-bearing solutions in different network development stages provides a reference for countries around the world.

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The 5G network is developing rapidly. However, due to spectrum resource limitation, it is expected to use the 5G network to ensure high resource utilization and network efficiency, while keeping part of 4G in the same band for existing 4G users. Dynamic spectrum-sharing (DSS) technology enables 4G/5G wireless networks to coexist in scarce spectrum resources and dynamically allocates spectrum resources in the same band. 4G/5G DSS has been successfully commercialized in some countries such as Germany and Brazil. However, complex 4G/5G DSS networks will introduce intra-frequency interference in the inter-system, which will affect network performance. Therefore, we innovatively proposed two interference mitigation schemes: buffer setting and rate matching. Furthermore, we have verified the practical performance of both schemes in a commercial network for the first time to determine the feasibility of the schemes. From theory, simulation, and practical analysis, both schemes can effectively mitigate the interference of the inter-system introduced by DSS: increasing the network rate by 60% in the interference environment and improving the user experience in the DSS architecture.

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