Collaborative Research: SII-NRDZ-SBE: Bridging the techno-economic gap for the design of spectrum Zone Management Systems

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Awards 2332054 and 2332055 fund collaboration between an economist and two electrical engineers who want to use insights from mechanism design to develop ways to share spectrum in the 6 GHz band. The project applies fundamental economic models to analyze markets for shared spectrum. The team will characterize the economic outcomes under different market structure and different spectrum sharing paradigms. This work is tightly coupled with analysis of the institutional and regulatory challenges of enabling market friendly spectrum sharing. Access to wireless spectrum is increasingly important for U.S. economic growth. In order to meet the ever growing demands for this resource, new spectrum sharing paradigms are needed and these paradigms need to be economically sound. This project is addressing this pressing need. If successful in enabling greater access to spectrum it will have broad impacts across society, including helping to close the digital divide, enabling new business to emerge, and improving productivity of existing businesses.This research project includes three distinct stages. Work funded by a different NSF award has established the COSMOS-NRDZ effort, which seeks to design a spectrum Zone Management System (ZMS) to enable interference-aware spectrum sharing. This approach is based in part on using the Spectrum Consumption Model (SCM) framework standardized in IEEE 1900.5.2. SCMs provide a way of characterizing the spectrum needs of different wireless systems, which the ZMS can then use to determine allocation of spectrum. This new research project addresses fundamental economic issues underlying such an approach, with a focus on spectrum sharing in the 6 GHz band. The team links the core economic theory of market performance into a multi-tier contracting model to stimulate sharing across heterogeneous networks. They are working in three parallel steps. First, they design spectrum sharing contracts that utilize the SCMs being developed in the NRDZ project, resulting in Spectrum Access Agreements (SAAs). Second, they specify and evaluate the performance of different market structures for allocating these SAAs. Third, they analyze the implications of market designs on industry structure and communications rules.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.