Armed forces' views on Shared Spectrum Access

Recent transition from mobile telephony to daily consumption of mobile data presents the challenge of adequate spectrum availability. Besides regulators and operators, this challenge faces both public safety authorities and military as well. This paper investigates how selected spectrum sharing concepts (namely, European Licensed Shared Access (LSA) and US Citizens Broadband Service (CBRS)) support the military interests either as a Primary User (PU) or as a Secondary User (SU) and whether these concepts facilitate temporal adjustments of national defence from peace time mode of operations to hybrid warfare or to large scale homeland defence. In this paper we have shown that military spectrum needs vary from one scenario to another and that Shared Spectrum Access may support expected needs of spectrum in times of most dire stress. Both of the concepts reviewed have built in dynamism, which however does not support PU-SU role changes across tiers.