Impact of Interference Between Neighbouring 5G Micro Operators

Local small cell deployments will become an important part of the future 5G networks, in particular in the higher frequency bands. In order to speed up the wide-spread deployment of such ultra-dense networks, new business and spectrum authorization models are needed. The recently proposed concept of micro operators with local spectrum micro licensing has gained significant interest in research, industry and regulation to complement the traditional models based on networks deployed and operated by the mobile network operators. While assessing the applicability of the proposed micro operator concept, one important aspect is to evaluate the impact of the inter-operator interference on the performance of the victim network when deployed in the same or adjacent channel. To support such interference evaluations between micro operators, this paper proposes a deployment scenario including two neighbouring buildings, propagation models for connections both within a building and between the buildings, and a criteria for the required minimum separation distance based on the observed throughput loss. Finally, system simulations are performed to evaluate the impact of the key deployment aspects on the required minimum separation distance between the micro operators in the 3.5 GHz band. The obtained results indicate that the required minimum separation distances are highly scenario-specific, which needs to be considered in the overall local spectrum micro licensing model development and the setup of appropriate rules to coordinate the interference.