Performance Gains of Spectrum Sharing in Multi-Operator LTE-Advanced Systems

In order to face the increasingly rising costs and reduce the required time to deploy and upgrade networks, network sharing is being embraced by many operators and multi-operator networks are being deployed worldwide. Despite being supported by current standards, spectrum sharing has not been widely adopted due to concerns over performance degradation under mismatched loading between systems. This paper addresses these concerns and studies the performance of spectrum sharing LTE-Advanced systems under different sharing scenarios. Advanced system level simulations are performed to measure and compare the performance of two LTE-Advanced systems under fixed spectrum allocation and spectrum sharing. Both matched and mismatched system loading are investigated under symmetric and asymmetric spectrum sharing scenarios. The performance gains are demonstrated and the bounds on spectrum sharing gains are determined.