Spectrum sharing between RLANs and Fixed Satellite Services in the 6 GHz band

The 6 GHz band is currently being proposed to open for unlicensed use in different countries. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just made available 1200 MHz of spectrum, from 5925 to 7125 MHz, for Radio Local Access Networks (RLANs) on April 23
^rd
, 2020. This band is currently allocated to Fixed Service (FS), Mobile Service (MS), and Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) links. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of aggregate interference from RLANs in the United States to FSS links in this band considering the rules recently proposed by the FCC. This work includes a sensitivity analysis of the main parameters that are currently under discussion among incumbents and Wi-Fi advocates. One of these parameters is the Wi-Fi airtime utilization, which is estimated in this work by measuring the airtime utilization using a software-defined radio in different environments. We found that coexistence will always be possible for low-power indoor access points (APs) and standard-power outdoor APs, which may generate aggregate interference up to -25.1 dB interference to noise ratio (I/N). This analysis provides useful guidelines to study the implications of spectrum sharing between RLANs and FSS in this band and can be replicated to other regions of the world.