Evaluation of business cases for a cognitive radio network based on wireless sensor network

Abstract

This paper proposes and evaluates three business case scenarios for deployment of a sensor network aided cognitive radio system in a typical European city. The first and main business case is based on spectrum sharing, where several spectrum owners establish a joint venture and this joint venture gets the rights to use the “unused” spectrum resources of all those spectrum owners in a cognitive way. Then we study the business case of a spectrum broker, an entity that deploys, builds and operates a sensor network and sells either sensing information or information on spectrum opportunities to one or more cognitive radio operators. Finally we analyze the potential of a new entrant without existing infrastructure or frequency licenses, that uses a sensor network aided cognitive radio system to offer a nomadic mobile broadband service. It is found that the spectrum sharing business case is one of the best possible cases for the studied system because the joint venture operator has free access to frequency resources of the mother companies, detailed knowledge of the primary systems and good possibilities for sharing infrastructure with the owning operators. However, since the studied system is an innovative concept and some of the assumed parameters are therefore uncertain, it should be noted that the main value of the business case calculations is to identify critical aspects influencing the profitability so that future research and development work can focus on them. It is found that the most critical aspects are the fixed sensor density, the fixed sensor operational costs and the number of new cognitive base station sites required.