Prof. Randall Berry (Northwestern), Dr. William Lehr (MIT), and Prof. Igor Kadota (Northwestern) received an NSF grant from the NSF SII-NRDZ-SBE program. The $300K project titled “Bridging the techno-economic gap for the design of spectrum Zone Management Systems” seeks to complement the work by by an ongoing NSF SII-NRDZ award, titled “Spectrum Sharing via Consumption Models and Telemetry – Prototyping and Field Testing in an Urban FCC Innovation Zone”

The ongoing project 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. The ZMS will evaluated via simulations and via real-world experimentation at the NSF PAWR COSMOS testbed.

The new NSF SII-NRDZ-SBE project proposes to address fundamental economic issues underlying such a spectrum sharing approach. Berry, Lehr, and Kadota will link core economic theory of market performance into a multi-tier contracting model to stimulate sharing across heterogeneous networks. The team pursues three parallel steps. First, they will design spectrum sharing contracts denoted by Spectrum Access Agreements (SAAs) that utilize SCMs. Second, they will specify and evaluate the performance of different market structures for allocating these SAAs. Third, they will analyze the implications of market design on industry structure and communications rules.