ITR: The 3 R's of Spectrum Management: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Many of the innovative recent wireless devices rely on the unlicensed spectrum, spurred by its openness to new uses and users. At the same time, vast amounts of spectrum are still exclusively licensed to services with sparse demand and to standards that use antiquated technologies. The current way of sharing the limited unlicensed spectrum that we do have is also far from perfect: devices suffer from very limited range even when there are no interference problems, and severe performance degradation when their local spectrum is shared by users from heterogeneous systems. We look at spectrum management through the lens of the traditional 3 R's of resource use: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. While Reduce has received by far the most attention from the engineering community, research in Recycle and Reuse is at a much more primitive state. But it is progress in the latter two areas that will be critical for the open and efficient sharing of the spectrum as a whole. Spectrum Recycling refers to fostering sharing and improving overall spectral efficiency while maintaining backward-compatibility with users of legacy systems like analog broadcast and cellular standards. Spectrum Reuse refers to the collaborative coexistence of multiple wireless systems, using limited interaction to share the spectrum fairly and efficiently. The proposed research takes a broad, systematic and inter-disciplinary approach to the fundamentals of these two problem areas, combining ideas from physical layer wireless communications, multiuser information theory and distributed coding, resource allocation and game theoretic analysis.