Dramatic changes in the ways wireless spectrum is allocated and utilized are needed to support the projected growth in mobile broadband access. This will require both innovations in new technologies as well as in the market structures used to deploy these technologies. These two issues are inherently joined.
New wireless technologies will establish the "ground rules", which govern how markets for spectrum access can operate. Market structures will determine which technologies are deployed and the resulting economic benefit.
The cross-disciplinary study of such market structures and the related spectrum sharing technologies is the focus on this project. Market models are being developed that take into account both the economic incentives of service providers as well as basic wireless networking considerations such as the management of interference. These models are being used to determine the effect of market structures on incentives for pricing, trade, and investment in new technologies and infrastructure, entry barriers, and competitive forces.
A range of spectrum sharing scenarios are considered including allowing for open access to spectrum bands, capacity sharing among providers and trading licenses on a spot market. A parallel goal of the project is to publicize the potential benefits and challenges associated with spectrum markets to the broader communications and networking communities.
Dramatic changes in the ways wireless spectrum is allocated and utilized are needed to support the projected growth in mobile broadband access. This project took a multidisciplinary look at the impact different market structures and related wireless spectrum sharing technologies will have on meeting this challenge. During the project, different models were developed and analyzed to illustrate the interaction of policy choices with both the economic incentives of competitive service providers and the underlying wireless network technologies. It was shown that this interaction can sometimee lead to outcomes that are not the intended goals of the corresponding policy decisions; such results can benefit the discussion of new policies by highlighting the potential issues involved. One specific area addressed in this project was studying the impact of extensive infrastructure sharing agreements among competitive service providers. Such agreements have the potential to more efficiently utilize wireless spectrum, but could also give service providers a dis-incentive to invest in their network. We showed that the forms of the sharing agreement was critical to determinign whcih of these effects dominated. A second key area addressed in this work was studying the price competition of wireless service providers under different forms of licensed and unlicensed spectrum sharing. Here, we showed that the type of sharing arrangement had a strong effect on the improvement consumers would see from making additional spectrum available, and indeed in some cases the consumers would be worse off. A final area addressed in this work was to study models for sharing spectrum between heterogeneous networks, with heterogeneous users. For such models, optimal pricing and bandwidth allocation policies were studied. A related goal of this project was to publicize the potential benefits and challenges associated with spectrum markets to the broader communications and networking communities. This was done in part through organizing panels at workshops and giving invited talks in Industry and academia.
