Spectrum Allocation and Reuse in 5G New Radio on Licensed and Unlicensed Millimeter-Wave Bands in Indoor Environments

In this paper, by exploiting the frequency-domain, we propose a countrywide millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum allocation and reuse technique to allocate and reuse spatially the countrywide 28 GHz licensed spectrum and 60 GHz unlicensed spectrum to small cells (SCs) on each floor of a building of each Fifth-Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) Mobile Network Operator (MNO) of an arbitrary country. We develop an interference management scheme, model user statistics per SC, and interferer statistics per apartment and formulate the amount of the 28 GHz and 60 GHz spectra per MNO. We derive average capacity, spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency (EE), and cost efficiency (CE) when employing the proposed technique, as well as the traditional static licensed spectrum allocation technique. We discuss the implementation of the proposed technique and evaluate the performance under two scenarios, namely, SCs operate only in the 28 GHz in scenario 1, and both 28 GHz and 60 GHz in scenario 2. Extensive results and analyses are carried out for four MNOs, i.e., MNOs 1, 2, 3, and 4, in scenario 1. However, in scenario 2, in addition to MNOs 1, 2, 3, and 4, an incumbent Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) operator is considered. It is shown that the proposed technique with no co-channel interference can improve average capacity, SE, EE, and CE of MNO 1 by 3 times, 1.65 times, 75%, and 60%, respectively, in scenario 1, whereas 6.12 times, 5.104 times, 85.8%, and 83.15%, respectively, in scenario 2. Moreover, with an increase in reuse factors, SE increases linearly and EE increases negative exponentially. Further, we show that the proposed technique can satisfy SE and EE requirements for sixth-generation (6G) mobile systems. Finally, we discuss offered benefits and point out key issues of the proposed technique for further studies.