5G for the Connected World

2Wireless Spectrum for 5G

Juho Pirskanen¹Karri Ranta‐aho²Rauno Ruismäki² and Mikko Uusitalo²

¹Wirepas, Tampere, Finland

²Nokia, Espoo, Finland

2.1 Current Spectrum for Mobile Communication

Spectrum is a limited natural resource setting basic requirements for the wireless system operation. For commercially viable communication systems, the optimal spectrum should meet several requirements. The amount of spectrum needs to be sufficient to carry traffic generated by the expected use cases. The spectrum should be globally available so that product implementations (base station [BS] equipment, devices, chipsets) could be used in different countries. Additionally, lower carrier frequency and high allowed transmission power would enable to build constant network coverage with lower number of needed BSs (BS).

However, due to several reasons, such single spectrum does not exist for cellular communications. Countries like US, China, Japan and European countries have used spectrum for different purposes during previous decades (e.g. radio and TV broadcast, satellite communication). The single block of spectrum in lower frequencies is not wide enough to carry all traffic generated by today's cellular communication. On higher operating frequencies, more spectrum is available, but challenging propagation conditions have made it difficult to use those in cellular networks to provide wide area coverage with economically feasible number of BS.

As a result, today's cellular standards as well as state ...