Spectrum and RAN Sharing: How to Avoid Cross-Subsidization While Taking Full Advantage of Massive MU-MIMO?

TL;DR

This paper explores fine-grained spectrum sharing in massive MU-MIMO systems, proposing an online algorithm that ensures operator isolation and avoids cross-subsidization, leading to significant spectrum efficiency gains.

Contribution

It introduces an online spectrum sharing algorithm for MU-MIMO systems that guarantees operator isolation and prevents cross-subsidization, with substantial performance improvements over static sharing.

Findings

Over 60% spectrum efficiency gain for 4 operators

Offline analysis shows potential for significant performance improvements

Proposed online algorithm outperforms static spectrum sharing methods

Abstract

Motivated by the need to use spectrum more efficiently, this paper investigates fine grained spectrum sharing (FGSS) in Multi-User massive MIMO (MU-mMIMO) systems where a neutral host enables users from different operators to share the same resource blocks. To be accepted by operators, FGSS must i) guarantee isolation so that the load of one operator does not impact the performance of another, and ii) avoid cross-subsidization whereby one operator gains more from sharing than another. We first formulate and solve an offline problem to assess the potential performance gains of FGSS with respect to the static spectrum sharing case, where operators have fixed separate sub-bands, and find that the gains can be significant, motivating the development for online solutions for FGSS. Transitioning from an offline to an online study presents unique challenges, including the lack of apriori knowledge regarding the performance of the fixed sharing case that is required to ensure isolation and cross-subsidization avoidance. We overcome these challenges and propose an online algorithm that is fast and significantly outperforms the static case. The main finding is that FGSS for a MU-mMIMO downlink system is doable in a way that is ``safe" to operators and brings large gains in spectrum efficiency (e.g., for 4 operators, a gain above 60\% is seen in many cases).