A performance evaluation tool for spectrum sharing in multi-operator LTE networks

Recent advances in wireless networking introduce the concept of resource sharing as one promising way to enhance the performance of radio communications. As the wireless spectrum is a scarce resource, and its usage is often found to be inefficient, it may be meaningful to design solutions where multiple operators join their efforts, so that wireless access of their terminals takes place on shared, rather than proprietary to a single operator, frequency bands. In spite of the conceptual simplicity of this idea, the resulting mathematical analysis may be very complex, since it involves analytical representation of multiple wireless channels. Simulation studies may be extremely useful to obtain a correct performance characterization of wireless networks with shared resources. In this spirit, the present paper introduces and evaluates an original extension of the well known ns-3 network simulator, which focuses on multiple operators of the most up-to-date cellular scenarios, i.e., the Long Term Evolution of UMTS employing OFDMA multiplexing. Spectrum sharing is represented through a proper software architecture, where several sharing policies can be framed. A detailed simulation campaign is run to assess the computational performance of the proposed architecture, and to show its effectiveness in analyzing realistic scenarios.