EARS: Enabling local spectrum markets for enhanced access and flexible service

目前，许可频谱服务由少数几家全国性的大型供应商提供，市场竞争仅在全国范围内实现。典型的供应商-客户合同期限相对较长，标准合同选择很少，无法为客户实现最佳价值。此外，移动的用户通常被限制使用到提供商的基站的远程通信，即使他们在其他用户的接入点的范围内，这些接入点目前负载不足，但对公众关闭使用。首先，研究了区域批发频谱市场的可行性，以及具有二级许可证和本地化运营的区域频谱提供商应发挥的作用。其次，它研究了灵活的供应商-客户频谱服务合同的设计和定价，这将使合同双方在其期望的风险回报权衡点。第三，本项目研究了接入、安全和激励机制设计问题，使用户能够作为微型提供者，或与其“社区”中的其他人分享其频谱合同。这些探索是利用投资分析、金融工程、风险管理、控制和优化以及网络博弈论等经济/商业理论，以及小规模用户调查和模拟实验进行的。该项目的更广泛目标是促进更分层的市场结构，以增加频谱服务承包业务的区域参与者数量，并且还使用户参与向其他用户提供频谱服务。更多的本地竞争将使频谱使用价格更具竞争力，本地扩展和覆盖范围更好，从而使用户能够更好地接入。用户彼此共享未使用的频谱将实现更好的频谱接入和速率，并为共享其未使用频谱的用户带来收入。本项目所探索的频谱服务创新，沿着区域供应商的出现，将允许用户拥有比目前更灵活的条款和条件的个性化频谱合同。

Licensed spectrum services today are offered by a few large providers with a national presence, and market competition is realized only at the national scale. Typical provider-customer contracts are relatively long term with few standard contract choices, which does not lead to the best value realization for the customer. Furthermore, mobile users are often restricted to using long range communication to the provider's base stations, even when they are in the range of access points of other users that are currently under-loaded but closed for public use.This project attempts to address those limitations. Firstly, it studies the viability of regional wholesale spectrum markets, and the role that should be played by regional spectrum providers with secondary licenses and localized operation. Secondly, it investigates the design and pricing of flexible provider-customer spectrum service contracts that would enable both contracting parties to operate at their desired risk-return tradeoff points. Thirdly, this project studies access, security and incentive mechanism design questions that can enable users to serve as micro-providers, or share their spectrum contracts with others in their "community". These explorations are conducted using economic/business theories of investment analysis, financial engineering, risk management, control and optimization, and network game theory, as well as small-scale user surveys and simulation experiments.The broader goal of the project is to facilitate a more layered market structure that will increase the number of regional players in the spectrum service contracting business, and also involve the users in providing spectrum services to others. More local competition would allow more competitive prices for spectrum usage, better local expansion and coverage, and therefore better access for users. Sharing of unused spectrum by users with each other would enable better spectrum access and rates, and revenue to users who share their unused spectrum. Spectrum service innovations that this project explores, along with presence of regional providers, would allow users to have individualized spectrum contracts with more flexible terms and conditions than what exist today.