Fair Dynamic Spectrum Management in Licensed Shared Access Systems

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 paper, 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 tradeoff between efficient spectrum allocation and flexibility in spectrum access for our proposed algorithms.