Security Challenges with LTE-Advanced Systems and Military Spectrum

LTE is universally recognized as the world-wide standard for next-generation mobile broadband services. Operating LTE in military spectrum has recently been proposed for a variety of use cases. First, due to the lack of available commercial spectrum, commercial operators are seeking to leverage underutilized military bands to offer improved commercial service. Second, given the ability for LTE to operate at high data rates in multipath environments, the technology could provide the military with more resilient communications in tactical environments. However, these proposed use cases for LTE are non-standard and certain military requirements cannot be immediately supported within the scope of the 3GPP standards. Emerging features within LTE-Advanced provide the initial building blocks for supporting LTE operations in heterogeneous environments that may include hostile interferers. LTE operation in military bands may be possible through the use of distributed spectrum sensing, spectrum allocation databases, carrier aggregation with non-military bands, and real-time radio resource management to cope with interference.