Analysis of coexistence strategies for cellular and wireless local area networks

The demand for ubiquitous communications necessitates the development of wireless communication systems which are able to offer high bandwidths for different types of traffic. The technological developments allow sophisticated and flexible systems with 'anywhere, anytime' capabilities. The bottleneck of such systems is the electromagnetic spectrum, which is scarce in nature. Measurements campaigns show that large parts of the licensed spectrum are not exploited or not utilized very efficiently. A dynamic frequency sharing strategy would allow systems with different radio access technologies (RAT) to use the same part of the spectrum. In this paper we describe and analyze two systems with different RATS which share the same spectrum. In our approach, frequencies belonging to different RATS are gathered in a spectrum pool without restrictions of the availability of the spectra for their owners and are shared according to a strategy to which we further refer as Spectrum Pooling (SP) [1], [2] and [3]. The Spectrum Pooling system has access to all frequencies within the pool and is allowed to access frequencies which are not used by the licensee. After the licensee accesses frequencies which are used by the SP system, the SP system has to release the frequencies which are affected. We develop a simulation model to capture the characteristics of such a system.