The ongoing development of mobile communication networks to support a wide range of superfast broadband services has led to massive capacity demand. This problem is expected to be a significant concern during the deployment of the 5G wireless networks. The demand for additional spectrum to accommodate mobile services supporting higher data rates and having lower latency requirements, as well as the need to provide ubiquitous connectivity with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) sector, is likely to considerably exceed the supply, based on the current policy of exclusive spectrum allocation to mobile cellular systems. Hence, the imminent spectrum shortage has introduced a new impetus to identify practical solutions to make the most efficient use of the scarce licensed bands in a shared manner. Recently, the concept of dynamic spectrum sharing has received considerable attention from regulatory bodies and governments globally, as it could potentially open new opportunities for mobile operators to exploit spectrum bands whenever they are underutilised by their owners, subject to service level agreements. Although various sharing paradigms have been proposed and discussed, the impact and performance gains of different schemes can be scenario-specific and vary depending on the nature of the sharing parties, the level of sharing and spectrum access scheme. In this survey, we describe the main concepts of dynamic spectrum sharing, different sharing scenarios, as well as the major challenges associated with sharing licensed bands. Finally, we conclude this survey paper with open research challenges and suggest some future research directions

Abstract-In order to satisfy the requirements of future IMTAdvanced mobile systems, the concept of spectrum aggregation is introduced by 3GPP in its new LTE-Advanced (LTE Rel. 10) standards. While spectrum aggregation allows aggregation of carrier components (CCs) dispersed within and across different bands (intra/inter-band) as well as combination of CCs having different bandwidths, spectrum aggregation is expected to provide a powerful boost to the user throughput in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). However, introduction of spectrum aggregation or carrier aggregation (CA) as referred to in LTE Rel. 10, has required some changes from the baseline LTE Rel. 8 although each CC in LTE-A remains backward compatible with LTE Rel. 8. This article provides a review of spectrum aggregation techniques, followed by requirements on radio resource management (RRM) functionality in support of CA. On-going research on the different RRM aspects and algorithms to support CA in LTEAdvanced are surveyed. Technical challenges for future research on aggregation in LTE-Advanced systems are also outlined.

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