This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Presence of a well-structured market is necessary for efficient and flexible use of licensed spectrum bands, and for fair pricing of spectrum usage. The goal of this project is to design radio spectrum markets that allow trading of spectral resources - not only of the raw spectrum, but also of a variety of service contracts derived from the use of spectrum. Specific sub-problems that will be addressed in this context include: 1) spectrum-portfolio construction that optimizes risk-versus-return trade-offs, 2) strategy design for optimal cooperation among providers, 3) price-driven dynamic scheduling of subscribers, 4) optimal pricing of spectral contracts, and 5) regulatory mechanisms for effective functioning of the spectrum markets. The solutions to the above problems take advantage of similar formulations in financial engineering, and use tools from optimization, stochastic calculus, and control and game theory.
The project is expected to revolutionize spectrum trading by facilitating the design of secondary spectrum markets and spectrum regulation policies. Towards this end, This project aims at establishing a new cross-disciplinary field that is at the interface of wireless networks and financial mathematics. The results will lead to more efficient use of the available spectrum by reducing spectrum wastage and fairness in pricing of wireless subscribers, and also help formulate governmental spectrum management and regulation policies. The results will be disseminated through publications in premier journals and conferences, and interactions with collaborators in the wireless industry.
