  Wireless connectivity is essential for industrial production processes and
workflow management. Moreover, the connectivity requirements of industrial
devices, which are usually long-term investments, are diverse and require
different radio interfaces. In this regard, the 3GPP has studied how to support
heterogeneous radio access technologies (RATs) such as Wi-Fi and unlicensed
cellular technologies in 5G core networks. In some cases, these technologies
coexist in the same spectrum. Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), which has already
been proven to increase spectrum efficiency in licensed bands, can also be
applied to this scenario. In this paper, we propose two solutions for mobile
network operators (MNOs) or service providers to dynamically divide (multiplex)
the radio resources of a shared channel between a Wi-Fi basic service set (BSS)
and one or several carriers of scheduled wireless networks, such as cellular
technologies, with a configurable level of sharing granularity. These solutions
do not require modifications to the current commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) end
devices. We adapt the existing IEEE 802.11 procedures to notify the Wi-Fi
stations that they must share channels with different access networks. We
demonstrate that our dynamic sharing proposals are also advantageous over
direct coexistence and evaluate each of them quantitatively and qualitatively
to determine when one or the other is preferable. The evaluation is
particularized for IEEE 802.11ac and long-term evolution (LTE) license assisted
access (LAA), but the solutions can be easily extended to 5G new
radio-unlicensed (5G NR-U) or to any other wireless technology in which the
network side schedules end device transmissions.
