Secondary Use of Radio Spectrum by High Altitude Platform

Abstract

Traditional spectrum licensing enables guaranteed quality of service but could lead to inefficient use of the spectrum. The quest to achieve higher usage efficiency for the spectrum has been the hottest research topic worldwide recently. More efficient transmission technologies are being developed, but they alone cannot solve problems of spatially and temporally underused spectrum and radio resources. In this chapter, the authors review major challenges in traditional spectrum sharing and mechanisms to optimize the efficiency of spectrum usage. They investigate and assess incentives of a primary terrestrial system and secondary system based on a High-Altitude Platform (HAP) to share spectrum towards common benefits. The primary terrestrial system is defined to have exclusive rights to access the spectrum, which is shared by the secondary HAP system upon request. The Markov chain is presented to model two spectrum-sharing scenarios and evaluate the performance of spectrum sharing between primary terrestrial and secondary HAP systems. Simulation results show that to reserve an amount of spectrum from a primary system could encourage spectrum sharing with a secondary system, which has a frequent demand on requesting spectrum resources.