Impact of spectrum sharing on 4G and 5G standards A review of how coexistance and spectrum sharing is shaping 3GPP standards

With the success of 4th generation of mobile communication, known as LTE, there is an increasing demand for additional spectrum to be made available to mobile network operator worldwide. However, spectrum is a finite resource and local regulators have only a limited if at all amount of frequencies available that could be auctioned off to service providers. Therefore, the industry is exploring unlicensed spectrum and sparsely occupied spectrum by geography, which demands fair sharing and coexistence with existing technologies using those frequencies. Further, new ideas like spectrum sharing models are investigated by the industry under guidance of local regulators who adopted this innovative concept.