Spectrum sharing for next generation wireless communication networks

Future wireless services are expected to provide data-rates in the order of 1 Gbps in local area and 100 Mbps in wide area. A very wide bandwidth is required to support such high rates, in the order of 100 MHz: this wideband will not be available for each operator, thus a shared access to the spectrum among operators is needed. An holistic approach to spectrum sharing is adopted in this paper: not a single layer or component is optimized, but the system as a whole. Advanced physical layer (PHY) and radio resource management (RRM) solutions, utilizing some cognitive radio concepts, are discussed.