Coordination context-based spectrum sharing for 5G millimeter-wave networks

Spectrum sharing is particularly promising for 5G-oriented millimeter-wave (MMW) networks, since MMW network deployments are predominantly expected to be only partially overlapping or adjacent islands, and it would not make sense to assign a dedicated sub-band to each operator in this case. However, inter-network interference may degrade the performance of both networks. Therefore coordination is needed to further improve the network performance. In this paper, a link-specific coordination context (CC) concept is proposed. The CC here for one link represents a constraint that needs to be considered by the scheduler in each AN in a sense that certain transmissions are only scheduled on “allowed” radio resources. To determine CC for each link that suffer non-negligible interference from other networks, the coordination procedure and algorithm is designed in both centralized and distributed structure in this paper. Finally, the performance is evaluated for spectrum sharing of two networks in corridor scenario with realistic ray-tracing propagation channel and steering directional horn antenna models in 60GHz. The results show that high gain beamforming enables more aggressive resource reuse and CC scheme can bring coordination gain over both blind full re-use (i.e. without coordination) and fixed orthogonal re-use (no sharing).