Spectrum Sharing in Satellite-Mobile Multisystem Using 3D In-Building Small Cells for High Spectral and Energy Efficiencies in 5G and Beyond Era

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel technique for sharing satellite spectrum with terrestrial-mobile 3-dimensional (3D) in-building small cells, namely femtocells. Both the space-satellite and the terrestrial-mobile systems (TMSs) operate at their respective licensed spectrums. However, due to the scarcity of the available spectrum, a huge amount of data generated indoors, and a high external wall penetration loss of a 3D building, we propose to reuse the satellite spectrum to small cells deployed only in 3D buildings of the TMS. The proposed spectrum sharing technique is detailed by identifying and addressing the major related issues. The co-channel interference generated because of the co-existence of the satellite user equipments (UEs) in the small-cell coverage is analyzed, and the handover procedures for a satellite UE toward and away from any small cell are discussed. The almost blank subframe (ABS)-based enhanced intercell interference coordination (eICIC) technique is employed to small cells in order to assure the quality-of-service (QoS) between small-cell UEs and satellite UEs. We derive the system-level capacity, spectral efficiency, and energy efficiency performance metrics for the proposed technique by varying the number of buildings over the coverage of a macrocell and deduce the condition for optimality for both the energy efficiency and the spectral efficiency. With an extensive system-level simulation and numerical analysis, we justify the impact of using the ABS-based eICIC technique toward provisioning QoS in terms of radio resource allocation. Furthermore, we show the outperformance of the proposed technique in terms of spectral efficiency and energy efficiency over the ones expected for the fifth generation (5G) network requirements as well as achieved by numerous existing techniques. Finally, we discuss the radio resource scheduler implementation as well as the significance, challenge, and future research perspective of the proposed spectrum sharing technique.