Heterogeneous Multi-Operator Spectrum Sharing Architecture for Massive IoT Access with NOMA

For the massive access of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in 5G or beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks, how to support the coexisting of cellular users and massive IoT devices with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees over limited spectrum is challenging. In this paper, inspired by the active radio access network (RAN) sharing standard of 3GPP, we present a heterogeneous multi-operator spectrum sharing architecture by leveraging the spectrum trading to support the coexistence of QoS-guaranteed cellular users and massive IoT devices with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). In the architecture, we formulate the spectrum trading between the wireless spectrum provider (WSP) and mobile network operators (MNOs) as a Stackelberg pricing game. Meanwhile, for each MNO, the cellular users and massive IoT devices can be both serviced in the uplink NOMA networks with QoS guarantees. For the pricing game, we prove the uniqueness of the equilibrium solution, which can maximize the payoffs of MNOs and WSP simultaneously. Moreover, we propose an iterative pricing algorithm to achieve the equilibrium solution with theoretical optimality guarantees. Simulation results demonstrate that our framework can support more IoT devices and reach the optimal spectral bandwidth price.