Flexible Spectrum Allocation Methods for Wireless Network Providers

The secondary market spectrum policy adopted by FCC opens the opportunities of flexible spectrum leasing and transfer between wireless network providers (NPs). When trading and allocating spectrum with the emerging market-oriented approach, the wireless NPs need to consider the economic influence when determining the needed spectrum. This paper proposes flexible spectrum allocation (FSA) methods for the NPs to choose by taking into account the NP´s operation revenue and provided QoS. Different criteria and corresponding optimization methods are designed for the NPs to determine appropriate amount of spectrum to apply and the respective amount of spectrum to allocate to its managed multiple radio access technologies (RATs). The system architecture incorporating the proposed methods for the NPs to coordinate spectrum sharing is also presented in this paper