Spectrum and RAN Sharing: How to Avoid Cross-Subsidization While Taking Full Advantage of Massive MU-MIMO?

Motivated by the need to use spectrum more efficiently, this paper investigates fine grained spectrum sharing (FGSS) in Multi-User massive MIMO (MU-mMIMO) systems where a neutral host enables users from different operators to share the same resource blocks. To be accepted by operators, FGSS must i) guarantee isolation so that the load of one operator does not impact the performance of another, and ii) avoid crosssubsidization whereby one operator gains more from sharing than another. We first formulate and solve an offline problem to assess the potential performance gains of FGSS with respect to the static spectrum sharing case, where operators have fixed separate subbands, and find that the gains can be significant, motivating the development for online solutions for FGSS. Transitioning from an offline to an online study presents unique challenges, including the lack of apriori knowledge regarding the performance of the fixed sharing case that is required to ensure isolation and cross-subsidization avoidance. We overcome these challenges and propose an online algorithm that is fast and significantly outperforms the static case. The main finding is that FGSS for a MU-mMIMO downlink system is doable in a way that is“safe” to operators and brings large gains in spectrum efficiency (e.g., for 4 operators, a gain above 60% is seen in many cases).