Licensed shared access field trial and a testbed for satellite‐terrestrial communication including research directions for 5G and beyond

Summary This paper describes a licensed shared access (LSA) testbed and field trials using a live network. The testbed includes real 4G base stations and up to 1000 virtual base stations, in the spectrum sharing scenario between satellite and cellular systems. The trials focus on 5G pioneer bands 3.4–3.8 GHz and 24.25–27.5 GHz where a satellite system is operating in the downlink direction and a cellular system is accessing the same band. The designed testbed supports both frequency bands. The performance evaluation concerns evacuation and frequency change times using different types of base stations in 3.6 GHz, that is, how fast the system relinquishes the shared band to the primary user and continues transmission using another band. We show that our LSA system is scalable and able to support large number of base stations. In addition, we investigate how satellite systems could reuse International Mobile Telecommunication (IMT) bands to offer enhanced satellite communication services for land, maritime, and aeronautical applications. Preliminary simulations and analysis confirm the possibility to reuse IMT spectrum for satellite systems without causing harmful interference to the terrestrial system. Licensed shared access (LSA) technology aims to provide predictable quality of service (QoS) for primary and secondary spectrum resource users. This paper describes the implemented testbed that is used to study spectrum sharing between terrestrial and satellites systems operating in 5G frequency bands. Achieved results in the field trial show that our LSA testbed is able to achieve rapid evacuation and frequency change times and support scalable number of base stations.