EARS: Collaborative Research: Automated Enforcement in Spectrum Sharing: Technical Challenges and Policy Considerations

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The increased demand for wireless communications over the last 25 years has led to the emergence of a new national priority: dynamic sharing of the radio spectrum among different stakeholders. Users with different rights and priorities must now collaborate to share a common resource without interfering with each other. A reliable enforcement regime that ensures rights is a way to make these rights meaningful and mitigate the associated risks. As spectrum sharing becomes a more widely adopted paradigm for utilizing the spectrum, it will become necessary to deploy a systematic enforcement regime that can be automated to the maximum extent possible so that the enforcement processes can occur in near real time and at scale while incurring reasonable financial costs. Much of the research and practice to date has focused on interference protection of the incumbents and on preventative (i.e., ex ante) approaches. This research examines approaches to improving ex ante protections, detecting interference events, identifying the interfering parties, and determining how these events are best enforced and adjudicated using techniques that can be readily automated.Static ex ante approaches (e.g., exclusion zones) are not readily adaptable to policy changes, and have high social costs. Database-driven approaches can be more responsive to changes, but require constant connectivity with radios and may not be geographically fine-grained. The investigators will develop the core components for enabling efficient policy-based spectrum access to reduce the social cost of ex ante enforcement. The investigators also aim to advance techniques to automate the enforcement of events after they occur, i.e., automate ex post enforcement. This involves detection, forensic analysis and adjudication. To automate the detection of events, the investigators will develop an efficient technique that uses mobile agents that have different roles in identifying, verifying and localizing a potentially enforceable event. The adjudication process involves identifying the non-compliant transmitters and ensuring that they comply with the necessary standards. To this end, the investigators propose to develop a transmitter identification scheme and a remote attestation scheme. Finally, the investigators will examine the different institutional strategies for ex post enforcement (i.e., third party enforcement, self-enforcement, and cooperative mutual enforcement) with the goal of understanding under what circumstances each approach would apply to spectrum sharing. These approaches promise to improve ex ante enforcement techniques and to advance ex post enforcement processes in a way that can be used to construct a comprehensive, robust and cost-effective enforcement system.