Quantified Spectrum Sharing: Motivation, Approach, and Benefits

A significant portion of the radio frequency spectrum remains underutilized with exclusive and static allocation of spectrum. The growing demand for spectrum has spurred a need for dynamic spectrum sharing paradigm. While the new dynamic spectrum sharing paradigm helps to improve utilization of the precious spectrum resource, there exist several obstacles on the technical, regulatory, and business fronts for the adoption of the new paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the existing techniques and argue for quantified approach to dynamic spectrum sharing and management. We introduce a quantified approach to spectrum sharing based on defining and enforcing quantified spectrum-access rights. By discretizing the spectrum-space in the time, space, frequency dimensions, this approach enables quantifying the spectrum consumed by individual transceivers. It enables defining and enforcing a quantified spectrum-access policy in real-time. The proposed quantified approach brings in simplicity, precision and efficiency in terms of spectrum commerce and operations while addressing the key technical and regulatory challenges.