User Association for Symbiotic Spectrum and Service Sharing Among Multiple Mobile Network Operators

Spectrum and service sharing among multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) is regarded as a promising technology to construct future mobile networks, because it provides a higher utilization efficiency of the network resources, e.g., spectrum and network infrastructure. However, each individual MNO may not be able to benefit from this technology without joint optimizations. In this paper, we investigate a symbiotic spectrum and service sharing paradigm, which can improve the overall performance of the multi-MNO network while guaranteeing each MNO benefits as well. Particularly, we formulate two user association problems with novel mutual benefit constraints, namely, sum rate maximization and load balancing. Besides, we introduce a sharing coefficient for inter-MNO service sharing, which can be regarded as an inter-MNO service level agreement (SLA) accounting for the regulation of user association behaviors. Then, we propose a successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm and a fractional programming (FP) based algorithm to solve the sum rate maximization problems for different inter-MNO sharing strategies. In addition, we also develop a Lagrangian dual decomposition based algorithm for the load balancing problems. Finally, extensive numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The results show that mutual benefit constraints can help multiple MNOs realize a symbiotic spectrum and service sharing paradigm. By comparing different inter-MNO sharing strategies, it can also be observed that the highest performance gain can be achieved when the multiple MNOs share their spectrum and service simultaneously.