Fair Dynamic Spectrum Management in Licensed Shared Access Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fair and regulation-aware dynamic spectrum management algorithm for Licensed Shared Access systems, ensuring equitable spectrum sharing among mobile operators and addressing compliance issues.

Contribution

It proposes a novel spectrum management algorithm that incorporates regulatory compliance and extends to multi-incumbent scenarios, enhancing fairness and flexibility.

Findings

Spectrum allocation is fair when operators comply with regulations.

Penalty functions influence spectrum sharing when operators misbehave.

Multi-incumbent scenarios reveal a trade-off between efficiency and flexibility.

Abstract

Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a spectrum sharing mechanism where bandwidth is shared between a primary network, called incumbent, and a secondary mobile network. In this work, we address dynamic spectrum management mechanisms for LSA systems. We propose a fair spectrum management algorithm for distributing incumbent's available spectrum among mobile networks. Then, we adapt the proposed algorithm to take mobile network operator's regulatory compliance aspect into account and penalize the misbehaving network operators in spectrum allocation. We extend our results to the scenario where more than one incumbent offer spectrum to the mobile operators in a service area and propose various protocols, which ensure long term fair spectrum allocation within the individual LSA networks. Finally, we numerically evaluate the performance of the proposed spectrum allocation algorithms and compare them using various performance metrics. For the single incumbent case, the numerical results show that the spectrum allocation is fair when the mobile operators follow the spectrum access regulations. We demonstrate the effect of our proposed penalty functions on spectrum allocation when the operators do not comply with the regulatory aspects. For the multi-incumbent scenario, the results show a trade-off between efficient spectrum allocation and flexibility in spectrum access for our proposed algorithms.