S3_LLNL - Spectrum Sharing Simulator

In March 2014, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in collaboration with National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), developed rules for Advanced Wireless Service (AWS-3) auction and reallocation of the 1695-1710 MHz and 1755-1780 MHz radio frequency bands, which at that time were allocated exclusively for Federal use. Most Federal systems using the 1755-1780 MHz band, including those of the Department of Defense (DoD), will relocate out of the band; however, the FCC’s rules provide for indefinite sharing with selected Federal systems. The NTIA’s Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory
Committee (CSMAC) Working Groups 3, 4, and 5 established protection distances around Federal systems operating in the AWS-3 bands to ensure interference-free operation between DoD and commercial AWS systems as the AWS systems enter the bands. The military Services and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Defense Spectrum Organization (DSO) developed transition plans to facilitate increasingly less restrictive sharing arrangements for early entry of commercial AWS systems and permanent sharing between commercial systems and DoD systems that will continue operating in the 1755-1780 MHz band. These transition plans include different tasks, among which to 1) facilitate expedited
and expanded entry of commercial deployments into the 1755-1850 MHz band, 2) to identify, assess, test/demonstrate, and operationalize coexistence techniques, interference mitigation, and other spectrum sharing enablers that support increased sharing between 4G/5G and incumbent DoD systems.
Different working groups have been created to target these tasks. One of them (WG4), is responsable for characterizing LTE/NR system performance in two major ways. In one case, the LTE system may be viewed as a system emitting transmissions that may potentially cause harmful interference to government receivers. In the other case, the LTE systems may have receivers that could be the recipients of harmful interference from government transmitters.
For the case where the LTE system is viewed as the emitter, WG4 is attempting to determine how the LTE emissions behave over a wide, metropolitan area and over extended periods of time.

In the above defined context, the objective of this Project is to develop a scalable (parallel, optimistic, dynamic load balancing) discrete event simulator capable of analyzing
mutual interference between current and near future LTE/New Radio (NR) cell phone systems and Department of Defense (DoD) assets. The goal is to build up a substantial body of knowledge on LTE/NR system behavior over a wide range of realistic conditions.The open source network and LTE/NR simulator ns-3 will be the starting capability for this program. In order to provide the best execution performance, the simulator shall support parallel execution using “optimistic” synchronization, and support dynamic load balancing across the computing cluster, in order to be able to scale the simulation to the order of thousands of eNBs and millions of users (UEs).

The coordination of the whole project is carried out by the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) in US, and CTTC and Pathfinder Wireless are partners of the project.