Collaborative GAA Clusters in Emerging Three-Tiered Spectrum Markets

Evident by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) incorporation of a light leasing approach, high utilization of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum can be achieved by the commercial Priority Access License (PAL) operators sharing resources with unlicensed General Authorized Access (GAA) users. However, proper integration of PAL operators and GAA users into this new three-tiered CBRS spectrum sharing market is an open issue. This work introduces a collaborative GAA-clustered framework to facilitate such integration. We propose GAA users form multiple distinct geographical clusters and utilize the CBRS spectrum collaboratively rather than through individual access requests. Each cluster will nominate a central entity called the GAA leader, who will directly communicate with the PAL operators regarding CBRS spectrum access and set up the necessary PAL-GAA connections. Such direct communication will reduce the messaging overhead between the central CBRS Spectrum Access System (SAS) and the users across PAL and GAA levels, providing a reliable and convenient spectrum-sharing platform. Here, we propose a novel leader selection algorithm (LSA) that uses a GAA user’s network density and perceived signal strength to assign a Leader Evaluation Score (LES) to evaluate and nominate the GAA user with the highest score as the cluster leader.