Authors
Swaroop Gopalam, Randall Berry, Dongning Guo, and Michael Honig
Abstract
The Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band is shared by the incumbent users (mainly consisting of Navy radars) and two tiers of licensed users. The incumbent users take priority and must be protected from the interference from the other tiers. Currently, this task relies on overnight computations based on future knowledge of Navy’s drills, licensed user activity, and propagation models, often requiring large margins to deal with uncertainty. We propose alternative mechanisms that exploit beacon signals for promoting efficient spectrum sharing in the CBRS band. We consider two approaches. In the first, the beacons sense the transmissions from the licensed users in real-time and make shutdown decisions, without requiring any feedback from the incumbent. In the second, the beacons transmit control signals to licensed users directly based on feedback from the incumbent (such as approximate position, interference level etc.). The licensed users make shutdown decisions according to a protocol (based on the received beacon signal strength, distance etc.).