1,310 research outputs found
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.
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]})
Information reuse in dynamic spectrum access
Dynamic spectrum access (DSA), where the permission to use slices of radio spectrum is dynamically shifted (in time an in different geographical areas) across various communications services and applications, has been an area of interest from technical and public policy perspectives over the last decade. The underlying belief is that this will increase spectrum utilization, especially since many spectrum bands are relatively unused, ultimately leading to the creation of new and innovative services that exploit the increase in spectrum availability. Determining whether a slice of spectrum, allocated or licensed to a primary user, is available for use by a secondary user at a certain time and in a certain geographic area is a challenging task. This requires 'context information' which is critical to the operation of DSA. Such context information can be obtained in several ways, with different costs, and different quality/usefulness of the information. In this paper, we describe the challenges in obtaining this context information, the potential for the integration of various sources of context information, and the potential for reuse of such information for related and unrelated purposes such as localization and enforcement of spectrum sharing. Since some of the infrastructure for obtaining finegrained context information is likely to be expensive, the reuse of this infrastructure/information and integration of information from less expensive sources are likely to be essential for the economical and technological viability of DSA. © 2013 IEEE
Cognitive Radio Networks: Realistic or Not?
A large volume of research has been conducted in the cognitive radio (CR)
area the last decade. However, the deployment of a commercial CR network is yet
to emerge. A large portion of the existing literature does not build on real
world scenarios, hence, neglecting various important interactions of the
research with commercial telecommunication networks. For instance, a lot of
attention has been paid to spectrum sensing as the front line functionality
that needs to be completed in an efficient and accurate manner to enable an
opportunistic CR network architecture. This is necessary to detect the
existence of spectrum holes without which no other procedure can be fulfilled.
However, simply sensing (cooperatively or not) the energy received from a
primary transmitter cannot enable correct dynamic spectrum access. For example,
the low strength of a primary transmitter's signal does not assure that there
will be no interference to a nearby primary receiver. In addition, the presence
of a primary transmitter's signal does not mean that CR network users cannot
access the spectrum since there might not be any primary receiver in the
vicinity. Despite the existing elegant and clever solutions to the DSA problem
no robust, implementable scheme has emerged. In this paper, we challenge the
basic premises of the proposed schemes. We further argue that addressing the
technical challenges we face in deploying robust CR networks can only be
achieved if we radically change the way we design their basic functionalities.
In support of our argument, we present a set of real-world scenarios, inspired
by realistic settings in commercial telecommunications networks, focusing on
spectrum sensing as a basic and critical functionality in the deployment of
CRs. We use these scenarios to show why existing DSA paradigms are not amenable
to realistic deployment in complex wireless environments.Comment: Work in progres
The Role of Licence-Exemption in Spectrum Reform
Spectrum reform initiatives in the US and Europe have identified a need to move away from the traditional command and control approach towards flexible and tradable licences and licence-exemption. Current regulatory initiatives are tending to focus on the flexible licensing route, and there is a risk that licence-exemption will be sidelined during the important formative years of this major policy transition. This must not happen; licence-exemption supports innovation and entrepreneurship and is an important second leg of a market-based spectrum management regime. A current case in point is the transition in UHF frequency bands from analogue to digital TV, where licence exempt use of resulting gaps in the spectrum could yield enormous benefits for citizens and consumers.spectrum policy, spectrum management, wireless services, deregulation, Telecommunications, regulation, Networks
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
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