Spectrum Refarming: A New Paradigm of Spectrum Sharing for Cellular Networks

Spectrum refarming (SR) refers to a radio resource management technique which supports different generations of cellular networks to operate in the same radio spectrum. In this paper, an underlay SR model is proposed for an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) system to share the spectrum of a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) system through intelligently exploiting the interference margin provided by the CDMA system when operating with a low system load. The asymptotic signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the CDMA system is used to quantify the interference margin, which interestingly does not depend on the instantaneous information (spreading codes and channel state information) of the CDMA system, thanks to its internal power control. By using the transmit power constraints together with the derived interference margin, the uplink resource allocation problem for OFDMA system is formulated and solved through dual decomposition method. The proposed SR system only requires high level system parameters from the CDMA system, hence, the upgrading of legacy CDMA system is not needed. Simulation results have verified our theoretical analysis, and validated the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation algorithm and its capability to protect the legacy CDMA users.