Collaborative Spectrum Managements and Sharing in Coordinated Space, Terrestrial and Ocean Networks

The development of the blue economy stimulates the growth of maritime activities, which presents challenges in offshore wireless communications. Increasing spectrum efficiency is one of the key solutions to improve network performance. As part of the global 5G wireless networks, advanced spectrum sharing techniques could be applied in offshore wireless networks. In this article, we describe a CSTON architecture for integrated offshore communication network. Under this architecture, we elaborate the technical challenges and provide a survey of the collaborative solutions for licensed spectrum managements, shared spectrum allocations and dynamic access strategies for unlicensed spectrum, respectively. The goal of this article is to offer an overview to illuminate the solutions of the technical challenges and provide the research directions in CSTON.