Fair Licensed Spectrum Sharing Between Two MNOs Using Resource Optimization

Spectrum sharing has been a modern approach to alleviate spectrum scarcity and its inefficient use in current wireless communications. Of specific interest in this paper is to explore the use of optimization approaches to enable a fair approach for spectrum sharing between two mobile network operators (MNOs). We formulate a constrained optimization problem to determine resource allocation and user scheduling across two MNOs. Since the problem is non-convex, we develop an algorithm, through fractional programming and block coordinate descent, to provide an effective solution. Our numerical results illustrate that the proposed spectrum sharing scheme can double the average user spectral efficiency (SE) among the two operators while ensuring that neither MNO is exploited for participating in the sharing mechanism.