Opportunistic tri-band carrier aggregation in licensed spectrum for multi-operator 5G hetnet

Increasing capacity of mobile networks is a real challenge due to rapid increasing of traffic demands and spectrum scarcity. Carrier aggregation technology is aimed to increase the user data rate by combining the throughput of few spectrum bands, even if they are not physically collocated. Utilization of unlicensed Wi-Fi 5 GHz band for mobile transmission opens new perspectives for carrier aggregation due to the vast amount of spectrum range, which can be available for aggregation to supplement data rates for end users. There are many solutions proposed to enable mobile data transmission in an unlicensed band without disturbing interference for the existing Wi-Fi users. The paper presents a new approach for opportunistic carrier aggregation in the licensed and unlicensed band for the multi-operator 5G network. It allows multiple network operators to utilize unlicensed spectrum opportunistically if it is not currently used by Wi-Fi or other mobile network operators. The performance of the proposed approach has been simulated in the case of two competing operators. Simulation results reveal that applying the proposed method ensures achieving satisfactory performance of carrier aggregation for the case of two network operators