System Design and Evaluation of Spectrum Management Architectures for Co-Primary Sharing in the 37 GHz Band

Abstract

This thesis presents a system design framework for evaluating spectrum management architectures enabling co-primary access in the 37 GHz band. Motivated by increasing demand for mid-band and mmWave spectrum, and recent policy directions for federal-commercial sharing, this research investigates the trade-offs between utilization efficiency, coordination overhead, and interference performance across thousands of feasible spectrum management system.

Using a morphological matrix, eight key architectural decisions were defined, including coordination topology, licensing mechanism, frequency planning, sensing mode, and access priority. A parametric event-driven simulation model was developed in Python to evaluate 2,808 valid architectures under low, medium, and high spectrum demand scenarios. The performance metrics, Spectrum Utilization Efficiency (SUE), Coordination Index (Cindex), and Blocking Probability (BP), were used to generate multi-dimensional tradespaces and identify Pareto-optimal solutions.

Results indicate that semi-dynamic spectrum management systems with decentralized or hybrid coordination topologies consistently dominate the Pareto frontier across all demand levels. Compared to fully dynamic systems, semi-dynamic designs achieve 80–90% of the utilization efficiency with way less than 50% of the coordination cost.

The results validate key hypotheses about performance trade-offs and offer actionable insights for regulators and system designers. This thesis recommends semi-dynamic, co-primary frameworks for initial 37 GHz implementation and proposes future research directions, including agent-based modeling, economic behavior integration, and acuarate physics modeling.