Special applications and spectrum sharing with LSA

The commercial long-term evolution (LTE) mobile networks of today offer fast and regionally wide access to the Internet and to the commercial applications and services at a reasonable price. At the same time, mission-critical public safety users are still communicating with old-fashioned, second-generation voice and data services. Recently, the commercial LTE networks have been standardized to offer capabilities to mission-critical users. However, the commercial networks do not yet fully support the coverage requirements of the mission-critical users. Moreover, the commercial infrastructure might be out of order in critical scenarios. Thus, the mission-critical commercial network users require, for example, rapidly deployed mobile networks to support their own communication. This thesis studies the public safety use of commercial operators' LTE networks and rapidly deployed closed LTE networks. The key tasks are to find out how to connect users seamlessly together between the different networks as well as managing the frequency use between these networks. This thesis provides practical design solutions to guarantee network interoperability as well as radio spectrum utilization solutions. Herein, the alternatives for spectrum sharing between public safety and commercial systems are discussed. Moreover, the thesis develops a specific spectrum sharing system for the mission-critical actors deploying their own network in scenarios where the commercial networks are insufficient. Then, this thesis proceeds on developing sensing methods to guarantee spectrum information for a rapidly deployed mobile network. The work assembles missing pieces of existing methods to ensure the functionality of the commercial and of the supporting rapidly deployed networks, both in terms of spectrum usage and application services.