A Survey on Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS)

To leverage the existing spectrum and mitigate the global spectrum dearth, the Federal Communications Commission of the United States has recently opened the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum, spanning 3550–3700 MHz, for commercial cognitive operations. The CBRS has a three-tier hierarchical architecture, wherein the incumbents, including military radars, occupy the topmost tier. The priority access licenses (PAL) and general authorized access (GAA) are second and third tier, respectively, facilitating licensed and unlicensed access to the spectrum. This combination of licensed and unlicensed access to the spectrum in a three-tier model has opened novel research directions in optimal spectrum sharing as well as privacy preservation, and hence, several schemes have been proposed for the same. This article provides a detailed survey of the existing literature on the CBRS. We provide an overview of the CBRS ecosystem and discuss the regulation and standardization process and industrial developments on the CBRS. The existing schemes for optimal spectrum sharing and resource allocation in CBRS are discussed in detail. Further, an in-depth study of the existing literature on the privacy of incumbents, PAL devices, and GAA devices in CBRS is presented. Finally, we discuss the open issues in CBRS, which demand more attention and effort.