Licensed Spectrum Sharing Schemes for Mobile Operators: A Survey and Outlook

Abstract

The ongoing development of mobile communication networks to support a wide range of superfast broadband services has led to massive capacity demand. This problem is expected to be a significant concern during the deployment of the 5G wireless networks. The demand for additional spectrum to accommodate mobile services supporting higher data rates and having lower latency requirements, as well as the need to provide ubiquitous connectivity with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) sector, is likely to considerably exceed the supply, based on the current policy of exclusive spectrum allocation to mobile cellular systems. Hence, the imminent spectrum shortage has introduced a new impetus to identify practical solutions to make the most efficient use of the scarce licensed bands in a shared manner. Recently, the concept of dynamic spectrum sharing has received considerable attention from regulatory bodies and governments globally, as it could potentially open new opportunities for mobile operators to exploit spectrum bands whenever they are underutilised by their owners, subject to service level agreements. Although various sharing paradigms have been proposed and discussed, the impact and performance gains of different schemes can be scenario-specific and vary depending on the nature of the sharing parties, the level of sharing and spectrum access scheme. In this survey, we describe the main concepts of dynamic spectrum sharing, different sharing scenarios, as well as the major challenges associated with sharing licensed bands. Finally, we conclude this survey paper with open research challenges and suggest some future research directions

Context‐Based Spectrum Sharing in 5G Wireless Networks Based on Radio Environment Maps

“…In the case of the "dynamic REM" scenario, the important factors are how accurate and how often the interference reports are and how often the indoor BSs are reconfigured. It is assumed that the interference reports are calculated using in (7). An example of interference reports from 15 outdoor UEs sent every 1 ms is shown in Figure 8.…”

Dynamic Spectrum Sharing in 5G Wireless Networks With Full-Duplex Technology: Recent Advances and Research Challenges

“…Several survey papers exist in the literature in the context of dynamic spectrum sharing and spectral coexistence covering a wide range of areas such as spectrum occupancy modeling and measurements [29,30], interweave DSS [31,32,34], underlay DSS [35][36][37], overlay DSS [38], MAC protocols for DSS [39], spectrum decision [43], spectrum assignment [44], security for DSS [40], learning for DSS [41,42], DSS under practical imperfections [13], licensed spectrum sharing [61][62][63] IoT, M2M and D2D [64][65][66][67] techniques [45], and the coexistence of LTE and WiFi [46]. Furthermore, the contribution in [37] provided a comprehensive review of radio resource allocation techniques for efficient spectrum sharing based on different design techniques such as transmission power-based versus SINRbased, and centralized versus distributed method, and further provided various requirements for the efficient resource allocation techniques.…”

Interference Study of Micro Licensing for 5G Micro Operator Small Cell Deployments

“…In the research domain, there have been studies on sharing between mobile network operators (MNO) in a so called co-primary shared model [7] where several MNOs access a common band with equal access rights. This model has also been considered for the millimeter wave bands in [8]- [9] requiring either complex coordination mechanisms between MNOs or resulting in interference between them.…”