A spectrum sharing model for compatibility between IMT-advanced and digital broadcasting

Abstract

Recently, the International Telecommunication Union allocated the 470–862 MHz band to the digital broadcasting (DB) service. Moreover, the 790–862 MHz sub-band will be allocated to the next-generation mobile system, known as the International Mobile Telecommunication – Advanced (IMT-A), and to the DB on a co-primary basis in the year 2015. Currently, two candidate technologies are available to represent the IMT-A system; the Mobile WiMAX and Long Term Evolution – Advanced (LTE-A). One of the main criteria of the IMT-A candidate is to not cause additional interference to the primary service (i.e., DB). In this paper, we address the spectrum sharing issue between the IMT-A candidates and the DB service. More precisely, we investigate the interference effect between the DB service and the mobile network, which could be either LTE-A or WiMAX. Our study proposes a spectrum sharing model to take into account the impact of interference and evaluates the spectrum sharing requirements such as frequency separation and separation distance. This model considers three spectrum sharing scenarios: co-channel, zero guard band, and adjacent channel. A statistical analysis is performed, by considering the interferer spectrum emission mask and victim receiver blocking techniques. The interference-to-noise ratio is used as an essential spectrum sharing criterion between the systems. The model considers the random distribution of the users, antenna heights, and the bandwidth effect as well as the deployment environment in order to achieve spectrum sharing. The results show that LTE-A is preferable to WiMAX in terms of having less interference impact on DB; this can eventually allow the operation of both services without performance degradation and thus will lead to efficient utilization of the radio spectrum.