Dynamic Exclusion Zones: Balancing Incumbent Protection and Spectrum Utilization Efficiency

This EARS (Enhancing Access to the Radio Spectrum) program was founded in response to the 2010 Presidential Memorandum on Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution mandated by Congress as part of the National Broadband Plan. It was referenced in 2010 State of the Union and later on the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 (More than 1/3 of the bill deals with radio spectrum), the PCAST 2012 Report [President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology] (which calls for vastly increased use of spectrum sharing) and the 2013 Presidential memo (Expanding America's Leadership in Wireless Innovation). The aim of this program is to identify bold new concepts with the potential to contribute to significant improvements in the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization, protection of passive sensing services, and in the ability for traditionally underserved Americans to benefit from current and future wireless-enabled goods and services. The impact is large on the economics of the Nation as seen on the last FCC bidding of 65MHz of the spectrum for over $45 billion early in 2015. It will enable access to science, engineering, industry, civilian and military users of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum.

Meeting national goals for expanded commercial access to the RF spectrum requires transitioning to a new Spectrum Access System (SAS) framework that will support more extensive sharing of the spectrum. Legacy spectrum management relies too heavily on segregating radios into static exclusion zones. The goal of this project is to address this challenge by studying and developing new frameworks for supporting dynamic exclusion zones that will enable much finer-grained, dynamic management of spectrum resources in multiple dimensions (i.e., time, space, and by user-class) to facilitate increased sharing among all classes of spectrum users, including those that rely on passive sensing systems.

The proposed research has both technical and economic components. For the technical component, it will develop a framework for implementing Incumbent Protection Zones (IPZs) that take advantage of the SAS database and spectrum sensing data to adjust the geo-contours of exclusion zones dynamically. This will expand opportunities for Secondary Users (SUs) to co-exist with Incumbent Users (IUs) without causing harmful interference. For the economic component, the project will investigate a new spectrum access right for invoking an Option-to-Exclude (OTE) other radios from transmitting in IU spectrum. The plan is to integrate the IPZ and OTE concepts in a game theoretic model. In addition, it will carry out detailed case studies that consider real-world challenges of sharing government spectrum with commercial users in the 3.5 GHz, 5 GHz, and AWS-3 bands. This research is intended to provide a practical framework that is both technically and economically viable for implementing incentive-compatible dynamic sharing solutions as part of the SAS framework.