Flexible Spectrum Management in a Smart City Within Licensed Shared Access Framework

The new generation of communication technologies, named 5G, brings along a variety of emerging applications and services from both human and machine perspectives. The growing demand for bandwidth in 5G may therefore lead to massive deficiency in wireless spectrum availability despite its under-utilization in urban areas. The Smart City paradigm assumes a multitude of communicating machines at high density, which requires improved spectrum management flexibility. The novel licensed shared access (LSA) framework that has attracted recent industrial and academic attention may become a feasible solution to leverage such underutilized spectrum more efficiently. This paper analyzes the effects of applying LSA in the Smart City context by proposing an appropriate mathematical model. Particularly, we focus on the vehicle-To-everything 5G use case where connected devices attempt to distribute their sensed data including occasional video information. The proposed analytical framework allows to capture the probabilities of rare events during such operation by providing with a high level of precision in the resulting performance estimates. © 2013 IEEE.