Fair Spectrum Allocation for Dynamic Spectrum Sharing between Different Radio Systems

With the growth in mobile traffic, additional spectrum allocation to international mobile telecommunications (IMT) is desired. However, most of these spectra are already being used by other existing radio systems, called incumbents. Thus, spectrum sharing between IMT and incumbents is required. This paper focuses on the fairness of the spectrum allocation to IMT in this form of spectrum sharing. To approach actual fairness, we newly define several fairness indicators and interoperator fairness for spectrum sharing and propose an algorithm to fairly and dynamically allocate spectrum resources to IMT according to demand and the fairness indicators. The proposed algorithm can easily solve for the fairness-maximizing spectrum allocation by treating the mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem as a simple resource exchange problem. The simulation results clarify that the proposed method on average improves fairness by 16% and satisfaction by 44% with high spectrum efficiency.