Spectrum sharing through dynamic channel assignment for open access to personal communications services

Abstract

This paper focuses on a narrow band technical solution that uses decentralized spectrum sharing to facilitate open access among competing personal communications services (PCS) operators. Existing policies that apportion spectrum by fixed channel assignment (FCA) involve inefficiencies resulting from fragmentation of the available resource into mutually exclusive frequency blocks. Dynamic channel assignment (DCA) has been previously demonstrated to be flexible in handling traffic variability and to simplify frequency planning for a single network operator. We use a discrete event simulation to demonstrate that DCA with autonomous reuse partitioning (ARP) provides more capacity than standard DCA; this property still holds when channels are shared among multiple operators, with partially overlapping networks and unequal traffic shares. We explore the impact of limiting the maximum number of channels that can be assigned to one cell site as an incentive for operators to build more cells, rather than simply appropriating channels from competitors.