Dynamic Frequency-Intelligent Reserve-and-Switch Technique (D-FIRST) to Combat Inter-Operator Interference

In this paper, a spectrum sharing scheme that will coordinate among different co-existing cellular operators competing for the same spectrum band is proposed. Based on this scheme, the cell of an operator can be divided into several sub-regions, and mobile stations (MSs) inside each sub-region form one subset. The whole frequency band assigned to a cell is partitioned into slots dedicated to the subsets based on the quality of service (QoS) demand. When interference from other operators is detected, the victim operator can switch the frequency of the interfered MSs with the MSs in the safe region, and/or switch to the reserved band. In this way, the inter-operator interference (IOI) can be reduced. From the simulation results, it is shown that with the proposed protocol, the total power consumption of both operators can be reduced significantly. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that in order to reduce the IOI in a high-density area, the operator should reserve more bandwidth for potential frequency-switching.