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

Enforcement and Spectrum Sharing: Case Studies of Federal-Commercial Sharing

To promote economic growth and unleash the potential of wireless broadband, there is a need to introduce more spectrally efficient technologies and spectrum management regimes. That led to an environment where commercial wireless broadband need to share spectrum with the federal and non-federal operations. Implementing sharing regimes on a non-opportunistic basis means that sharing agreements must be implemented. To have meaning, those agreements must be enforceable.\ud \ud With the significant exception of license-free wireless systems, commercial wireless services are based on exclusive use. With the policy change facilitating spectrum sharing, it becomes necessary to consider how sharing might take place in practice. Beyond the technical aspects of sharing, that must be resolved lie questions about how usage rights are appropriately determined and enforced. This paper is reasoning about enforcement in a particular spectrum bands (1695-1710 MHz and 3.5 GHz) that are currently being proposed for sharing between commercial services and incumbent spectrum users in the US. We examine three enforcement approaches, exclusion zones, protection zones and pure ex post and consider their implications in terms of cost elements, opportunity cost, and their adaptability

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.

Towards distributed architecture for collaborative cloud services in community networks

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for communities to collaborate, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing, and through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community networks have also emerged. Community networks get formed when individuals and local organisations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community’s demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. The consolidation of today’s cloud technologies offers now the possibility of collectively built community clouds, building upon user-generated content and user-provided networks towards an ecosystem of cloud services. To address the limitation and enhance utility of community networks, we propose a collaborative distributed architecture for building a community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. Such architecture needs to be tailored to the specific social, economic and technical characteristics of the community networks for community clouds to be successful and sustainable. By real deployments of clouds in community networks and evaluation of application performance, we show that community clouds are feasible. Our result may encourage collaborative innovative cloud-based services made possible with the resources of a community.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence

Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall. Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii) secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons. Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design challenges and suggest future research directions

An Overview of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks for the Existing Protocols and Applications

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of two or more devices or nodes or terminals with wireless communications and networking capability that communicate with each other without the aid of any centralized administrator also the wireless nodes that can dynamically form a network to exchange information without using any existing fixed network infrastructure. And it's an autonomous system in which mobile hosts connected by wireless links are free to be dynamically and some time act as routers at the same time, and we discuss in this paper the distinct characteristics of traditional wired networks, including network configuration may change at any time, there is no direction or limit the movement and so on, and thus needed a new optional path Agreement (Routing Protocol) to identify nodes for these actions communicate with each other path, An ideal choice way the agreement should not only be able to find the right path, and the Ad Hoc Network must be able to adapt to changing network of this type at any time. and we talk in details in this paper all the information of Mobile Ad Hoc Network which include the History of ad hoc, wireless ad hoc, wireless mobile approaches and types of mobile ad Hoc networks, and then we present more than 13 types of the routing Ad Hoc Networks protocols have been proposed. In this paper, the more representative of routing protocols, analysis of individual characteristics and advantages and disadvantages to collate and compare, and present the all applications or the Possible Service of Ad Hoc Networks.Comment: 24 Pages, JGraph-Hoc Journa