Coordination between access points in distributed flexible spectrum use

Uncoordinated deployments of high number of access points are likely to consist of separate, overlapping local area networks, creating a demand for solutions enabling networks to co-exist in the same frequency band. Such uncoordinated deployments would benefit significantly on self-organizing Flexible Spectrum Use (FSU), which would in practice provide some degree of automated network optimization for the system. In our paper, we study the distributed FSU in the context of uncoordinated deployment (i.e. randomly placed of APs, where UEs may be connected to clearly suboptimal faraway APs). The goal is to understand if there is any need for FSU coordination in a scenario of completely distributed APs belonging to multiple networks. The results indicate that for the scenarios with several overlapping networks FSU coordination is necessary. Otherwise decent coverage cannot be obtained and thus spectrum resources are not shared fairly among the users.