A real-time big-data system for smart spectrum sharing: Enabling affordable broadband in 5g for underserved communities

The dream of connecting under-served global communities with affordable broadband internet has been given a new hope with the advent of spectrum sharing wireless broadband networks in the TV-band frequencies. There is however a technical challenge from the software engineering perspective of developing such solutions. This is mainly due to the fact that such solutions require vast numbers of network devices to communicate to a smart spectrum sharing system with real-time response expectation. This paper will discuss a big-data cloud framework for a smart spectrum sharing system. Firstly, smart spectrum sharing based wireless broadband networks (S3-WBN) as means to enable broadband connectivity through dynamic spectrum access (DSA) will be introduced. The marriage between spectrum sharing and fifth Generation (5G) networks is then presented. Cloud based spectrum sharing for 5G networks will be the next section. This will encompass challenges of designing smart spectrum sharing wireless broadband networks and systems that enable them, alternative cloud-based solutions when developing such systems and how the cloud enables functionality of such systems, and results that were uncovered as findings from the test bed of the case study of an implementation of smart spectrum sharing Database system (S3DB).