Public safety and commercial spectrum sharing via network pricing and admission control

Public safety and commercial communications have distinct performance objectives. The former requires a high availability (i.e., low blocking), both in normal times and during a disaster, whereas the latter requires a high network revenue performance in normal times. Therefore, public safety and commercial communications traditionally use separate networks, which results in either spectrum inefficiency or unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a public safety and commercial spectrum sharing strategy via intelligent network pricing and call admission control. We provide a precise characterization of the performance objectives of such a sharing strategy, which is to maximize the commercial revenue while guaranteeing a low blocking probability to public safety calls. We demonstrate through analysis and simulation that our sharing strategy simultaneously satisfies the objectives of both types of communications