Sharing of unlicensed spectrum by strategic operators

Abstract

Facing the challenge of meeting ever-increasing demand for wireless data, the industry is striving to exploit large swaths of spectrum which anyone can use for free without having to obtain a license. Major standards bodies are currently considering a proposal to retool and deploy Long Term Evolution (LTE) technologies in unlicensed bands below 6 GHz. This paper studies the fundamental questions of whether and how the unlicensed spectrum can be shared by intrinsically strategic operators without suffering from the tragedy of the commons. A class of general utility functions is considered. The spectrum sharing problem is formulated as a repeated game over a sequence of time slots. It is first shown that a simple static sharing scheme allows a given set of operators to reach a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium for mutually beneficial sharing. The question of how many operators will choose to enter the market is also addressed by studying an entry game. A sharing scheme which allows dynamic spectrum borrowing and lending between operators is then proposed to address time-varying traffic and proved to achieve perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Numerical results show that the proposed dynamic sharing scheme outperforms static sharing, which in turn achieves much higher revenue than uncoordinated full-spectrum sharing.Implications of the results to the standardization and deployment of LTE in unlicensed bands (LTE-U) are also discussed.

Strategic Interaction between Operators in the Context of Spectrum Sharing for 5G Networks

“…In [17], the authors investigate a particular class of congestion games and learning mechanisms to design a distributed solution to the wireless network slicing problem. In the same way, there are some studies that analyze the network sharing, based on game theory, such as [18][19][20][21]. In the framework of the queue theory, in [22] the effects of queueing delays and users' related costs on the management and control computing resources are analyzed.…”

RRC State Handling for 5G

“…The most generic non-orthogonal spectrum sharing approach assumes that the operators can non-orthogonally transmit on a common resource pool, while choosing their upper-bounded transmission power density to maximize their utility [47][48][49][50][51][52]. This is often modelled as non-cooperative strategic games where each player is assumed to be comprised of a single Base Station (BS)-UE pair.…”

“…However, this leads to poor performance if there is strong inter-operator interference. Alternatively, repeated games are intensively used to guar-antee long term benefit to the players [49][50][51][52]. This can be achieved, for example, through the optimization of Pareto efficient point [49], orthogonal allocation [51], social optimum [50] and subgame perfect NE [52].…”

A Hierarchical Game Approach for Multi-Operator Spectrum Sharing in LTE Unlicensed

“…This will result in severe interference among the operators sharing the unlicensed spectrum. Spectrum sharing among multiple operators has been studied in [10]- [12]. Specifically, a network architecture has been presented for spectrum sharing among operators in [11] where simulation results are presented to evaluate the performance.…”

“…In [12], the authors studies the spectrum allocation among operators sharing a common pool of spectrum. In [10], the authors studied the coexistence among non-cooperative operators in the unlicensed spectrum and proposed a mechanism for operators to share the spectrum in a given area.…”