Spectrum is increasingly being shared between new entrants and incumbents, for example in the 3.55-3.7 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and the 6 GHz unlicensed band (5.925-7.125 GHz). Sharing in these bands is between a commercial system, such as cellular or Wi-Fi and incumbent services like radars, fixed microwave links or satellite links. It is important to learn from these deployed systems through detailed measurements to evolve existing methodologies for new bands. However, there are no large-scale wireless community testbeds explicitly devoted to evaluating sharing in new bands such as 6 GHz, but commercial deployments are proliferating and can be leveraged for experimental studies using the right approach. Hence, in this article we describe tools and methodologies that can be used to quantify the performance of real-world spectrum sharing, using the 6 GHz band as an example. We present detailed analyses based on extensive measurements on dense deployments at the University of Michigan (UMich) and the University of Notre Dame (UND) that show that the proposed sharing mechanism is working well: measured signal strength outdoors from indoor deployments, ranging from −81 dBm to −89 dBm over 20 MHz, do not pose interference risk. Further, our methodology allows us to determine appropriate enabling signal levels for client-to-client (C2C) communications that protect incumbents. In addition to the tools and methodology developed, the dataset collected in this work will be publicly available for the community for further research in spectrum sharing.
