  Recent study predicts that by 2020 up to 50 billion IoT devices will be
connected to the Internet, straining the capacity of wireless network that has
already been overloaded with data-hungry mobile applications, such as
high-definition video streaming and virtual reality(VR)/augmented reality(AR).
How to accommodate the demand for both massive scale of IoT devices and
high-speed cellular services in the physically limited spectrum without
significantly increasing the operational and infrastructure costs is one of the
main challenges for operators. In this article, we introduce a new
multi-operator network sharing framework that supports the coexistence of IoT
and high-speed cellular services. Our framework is based on the radio access
network (RAN) sharing architecture recently introduced by 3GPP as a promising
solution for operators to improve their resource utilization and reduce the
system roll-out cost. We evaluate the performance of our proposed framework
using the real base station location data in the city of Dublin collected from
two major operators in Ireland. Numerical results show that our proposed
framework can almost double the total number of IoT devices that can be
supported and coexist with other cellular services compared with the case
without network sharing.
