Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography

This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is continually updated on the webpage \url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail (\textit{[email protected]})

Wi-Fi Offload: Tragedy of the Commons or Land of Milk and Honey?

Fueled by its recent success in provisioning on-site wireless Internet access, Wi-Fi is currently perceived as the best positioned technology for pervasive mobile macro network offloading. However, the broad transitions of multiple collocated operators towards this new paradigm may result in fierce competition for the common unlicensed spectrum at hand. In this light, our paper game-theoretically dissects market convergence scenarios by assessing the competition between providers in terms of network performance, capacity constraints, cost reductions, and revenue prospects. We will closely compare the prospects and strategic positioning of fixed line operators offering Wi-Fi services with respect to competing mobile network operators utilizing unlicensed spectrum. Our results highlight important dependencies upon inter-operator collaboration models, and more importantly, upon the ratio between backhaul and Wi-Fi access bit-rates. Furthermore, our investigation of medium- to long-term convergence scenarios indicates that a rethinking of control measures targeting the large-scale monetization of unlicensed spectrum may be required, as otherwise the used free bands may become subject to tragedy-of-commons type of problems.Comment: Workshop on Spectrum Sharing Strategies for Wireless Broadband Services, IEEE PIMRC'13, to appear 201

The Case for Liberal Spectrum Licenses: A Technical and Economic Perspective

The traditional system of radio spectrum allocation has inefficiently restricted wireless services. Alternatively, liberal licenses ceding de facto spectrum ownership rights yield incentives for operators to maximize airwave value. These authorizations have been widely used for mobile services in the U.S. and internationally, leading to the development of highly productive services and waves of innovation in technology, applications and business models. Serious challenges to the efficacy of such a spectrum regime have arisen, however. Seeing the widespread adoption of such devices as cordless phones and wi-fi radios using bands set aside for unlicensed use, some scholars and policy makers posit that spectrum sharing technologies have become cheap and easy to deploy, mitigating airwave scarcity and, therefore, the utility of exclusive rights. This paper evaluates such claims technically and economically. We demonstrate that spectrum scarcity is alive and well. Costly conflicts over airwave use not only continue, but have intensified with scientific advances that dramatically improve the functionality of wireless devices and so increase demand for spectrum access. Exclusive ownership rights help direct spectrum inputs to where they deliver the highest social gains, making exclusive property rules relatively more socially valuable. Liberal licenses efficiently accommodate rival business models (including those commonly associated with unlicensed spectrum allocations) while mitigating the constraints levied on spectrum use by regulators imposing restrictions in traditional licenses or via use rules and technology standards in unlicensed spectrum allocations.

A National Broadband Plan for Our Future: A Customer-Centric Framework

Congress has recently charged the Federal Communications Commission to establish a National Broadband Plan. This paper argues that a customer-centric plan, which puts the customer in control of decision-making, will yield the best broadband result for the U.S. The Federal government must establish a market infrastructure that encourages competition, requires transparency of both network providers and application providers, and includes vigorous antitrust enforcement. Competition from wireless broadband is present now and will become far more prevalent shortly, on the basis of current and announced investment plans. Regulators must also make available far more licensed spectrum to ensure this competition is realized. Calls for regulation in the form of mandated unbundling and more unlicensed spectrum are regulatory cul-de-sacs with proven track records of failure. Calls for regulatory control of network provider practices (other than transparency), such as network neutrality, are misguided. Such decisions are best left to customers, who can very well decide for themselves which of the broadband providers offer terms that best suit the customer.Technology and Industry

The hinges of destiny: A decision analysis of spectrum users' choices

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been a technological approach that has received considerable research attention over the past decade. At the same time, the relative paucity of deployed systems using some of these technologies speaks to either a mismatch between research priorities and practical needs, regulatory immaturity, technology immaturity, or a combination of these. In this paper, we examine the business decision that a spectrum entrant must take with regard to technology choice. We use a simple decision-analytic framework using standard Net Present Value (NPV) calculations to analyze that decision. Our conclusion is that, the spectrum decision is time dependent. Exclusive use offers a higher NPV than the alternatives in the long run, but it takes time for exclusive use to become the dominant choice. Cooperative sharing provides the second highest NPV when the spectrum market is liquid, followed by opportunistic sharing under optimistic spectrum availability and contention assumptions. If our assumptions are relatively close to reality, it is therefore not surprising that we do not see greater adoption of DSA technologies-it is not the top choice for spectrum entrants with a long term view. The second choice, cooperative sharing, does occur, but in the form of MVNO agreements. The last option for a spectrum entrant is opportunistic sharing. Why should an entrant settle for the third best approach? © 2012 IEEE

Tragedy of the Regulatory Commons: LightSquared and the Missing Spectrum Rights

The endemic underuse of radio spectrum constitutes a tragedy of the regulatory commons. Like other common interest tragedies, the outcome results from a legal or market structure that prevents economic actors from executing socially efficient bargains. In wireless markets, innovative applications often provoke claims by incumbent radio users that the new traffic will interfere with existing services. Sometimes these concerns are mitigated via market transactions, a la “Coasian bargaining.” Other times, however, solutions cannot be found even when social gains dominate the cost of spillovers. In the recent “LightSquared debacle,” such spectrum allocation failure played out. GPS interests that access frequencies adjacent to the band hosting LightSquared’s new nationwide mobile network complained that the wireless entrant would harm the operation of locational devices. Based on these complaints, regulators then killed LightSquared’s planned 4G network. Conservative estimates placed the prospective 4G consumer gains at least an order of magnitude above GPS losses. “Win win” bargains were theoretically available, fixing GPS vulnerabilities while welcoming the highly valuable wireless innovation. Yet transaction costs—largely caused by policy choices to issue limited and highly fragmented spectrum usage rights (here in the GPS band)—proved prohibitive. This episode provides a template for understanding market and non-market failure in radio spectrum allocation

Managing the radio spectrum : framework for reform in developing countries

Bringing management of the radio spectrum closer to markets is long overdue. The radio spectrum is a major component of the infrastructure that underpins the information society. Spectrum management, however, has not kept up with major changes in technology, business practice, and economic policy that have taken place worldwide during the last two decades. For many years traditional government administration of the spectrum worked reasonably well, but more recently it has led to growing technical and economic inefficiencies as well as obstacles to technological innovation. Two alternative approaches to spectrum management are being tried in several countries, one driven by the market (tradable spectrum rights) and another driven by technology innovation (spectrum commons). This paper discusses the basic features, advantages and limitations, scope of application, and requirements for implementation of these three approaches. The paper then discusses how these approaches can be made to work under conditions that typically prevail in developing countries, including weak rule of law, limited markets, and constrained fiscal space. Although spectrum reform strategies for individual countries must be developed case by case, several broadly applicable strategic options are outlined. The paper proposes a phased approach to addressing spectrum reform in a country. It ends by discussing aspects of institutional design, managing the transition, and addressing high-level changes such as the transition to digital television, the path to third-generation mobile services, launching of wireless fixed broadband services, and releasing military spectrum. The paper is extensively annotated and referenced.E-Business,Roads&Highways,Telecommunications Infrastructure,Climate Change,ICT Policy and Strategies

Best Effort versus Spectrum Markets: Wideband and Wi-Fi versus 3G MVNOs?

This paper asks is whether (i) 3rd generation wireless services, as embodied in the planned and soon to be offered services emerging first in Asia and Europe, or (ii) the unlicensed wireless services such as 802.11 or wi-fi but also including more advanced wideband and ultrawideband (UWB) services which are being experimented with primarily in North America, offer more compelling visions for advanced wireless services. we conclude that secondary spectrum markets are important for the viability of the 3G industry, and not only for reasons of efficiency. One large difference between 2G and 3G networks, observed in our models, was that voice services alone would not generate sufficient revenues for a 3G system. License holders which up to now have concentrated on selling a single product, will need to develop a much larger range of advanced applications, which will have to be marketed and packaged in different ways for different market segments

TVWS policies to enable efficient spectrum sharing

The transition from analogue to the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTV) in Europe is planned to be completed by the end of the year 2012. The DTV spectrum allocation is such that there are a number of TV channels which cannot be used for additional high power broadcast transmitters due to mutual interference and hence are left unused within a given geographical location, i.e. the TV channels are geographically interleaved. The use of geographically interleaved spectrum provides for the so-called TV white spaces (TVWS) an opportunity for deploying new wireless services. The main objective of this paper is to present the spectrum policies that are suitable for TVWS at European level, identified within the COGEU project. The COGEU project aims the efficient exploitation of the geographical interleaved spectrum (TVWS). COGEU is an ICT collaborative project supported by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme. Nine partners from seven EU countries representing academia, research institutes and industry are involved in the project. The COGEU project is a composite of technical, business, and regulatory/policy domains, with the objective of taking advantage of the TV digital switchover by developing cognitive radio systems that leverage the favorable propagation characteristics of the UHF broadcast spectrum through the introduction and promotion of real-time secondary spectrum trading and the creation of new spectrum commons regimes. COGEU will also define new methodologies for compliance testing and certification of TVWS equipment to ensure non-interference coexistence with the DVB-T European standard. The innovation brought by COGEU is the combination of cognitive access to TV white spaces with secondary spectrum trading mechanisms.telecommunications,spectrum management,secondary spectrum market,regulation,TV white spaces,cognitive radio