Mutual interference in OFDM-based spectrum pooling systems

TLDR

The scarcity of mobile radio spectrum and the limited use of wide spectral ranges motivate spectrum pooling, but OFDM modulation introduces drawbacks. The study seeks to enable public access to underutilized spectral ranges via spectrum pooling while preserving licensed users’ transmission quality. The authors model the non‑orthogonal interaction between licensed and OFDM‑based rental transmissions, quantify the resulting SNR loss, and propose mitigation through time‑domain windowing or adaptive subcarrier deactivation to create flexible guard bands. Both mitigation strategies reduce rental system bandwidth, and a quantitative trade‑off analysis shows how interference reduction balances against throughput loss.

Abstract

The public mobile radio spectrum has become a scarce resource while wide spectral ranges are only rarely used. Here, the new strategy called spectrum pooling is considered. It aims at enabling public access to these spectral ranges without sacrificing the transmission quality of the actual license owners. Unfortunately, using OFDM modulation in a spectrum pooling system has some drawbacks. There is an interaction between the licensed system and the OFDM based rental system due to the non-orthogonality of their respective transmit signals. This interaction is described mathematically, providing a quantitative evaluation of the mutual interference that leads to an SNR loss in both systems. However, this interference can be mitigated by windowing the OFDM signal in the time domain or by the adaptive deactivation of adjacent subcarriers providing flexible guard bands between licensed and rental system. It is obvious that both approaches sacrifice bandwidth of the rental system. A quantitative comparison of both approaches is given as a tradeoff between interference reduction and throughput in the rental system.