The coexistence between active wireless communications and passive RF spectrum use becomes an increasingly important requirement for coordinated spectrum access supporting critical services. The ongoing research and technological progress are focused on effective spectrum utilization including large-scale MIMO and energy efficient and low-power communications, innovative spectrum use and management, and resilient spectrum sharing, just to name a few. This paper introduces a new tool for real time spectrum sharing among emerging cellular networks and passive RF sensing systems used for remote sensing and radio astronomy, among others. Specifically we propose leveraging wireless channel virtualization and propose a virtual-to-physical resource mapping framework, mapping types, and control signaling that extends the current 5G New Radio (NR) specifications. Our technology introduces minimal changes to the protocol and is meant to be transparent to the end user application. We validate the proposed technology by extending a 3GPP compliant 5G NR downlink simulator and identify further research directions where work is needed on designing effective ways to explicitly signal the need for spectrum or spectrum use predictions.

翻译：主动无线通信与被动射频频谱使用的共存，正成为协调关键业务频谱接入中日益重要的需求。当前的研究与技术进展聚焦于有效频谱利用，包括大规模MIMO、高能效低功耗通信、创新频谱使用与管理以及弹性频谱共享等方向。本文提出了一种新型工具，用于新兴蜂窝网络与用于遥感和射电天文学等领域的被动射频传感系统之间的实时频谱共享。具体而言，我们提出利用无线信道虚拟化，并设计了一套虚拟到物理资源映射框架、映射类型及控制信令，以扩展当前5G新空口（NR）规范。该技术在协议层面引入最小改动，且对终端用户应用透明。我们通过扩展符合3GPP标准的5G NR下行链路仿真器验证了所提技术，并指出了需要进一步研究的方向，即如何设计有效方法明确信号频谱需求或进行频谱使用预测。