Law governed peer-to-peer secondary spectrum marketplaces

Abstract

We describe a decentralized peer-to-peer online secondary spectrum marketplace, where consumers can trade exclusive access rights to a specific portion of the spectrum (designated by geographic location, frequency band and time period) in return for fee payment, under the constraint of obeying the trading rules formulated by the government. The main advantage of such an innovative secondary spectrum marketplace over the current state of the art is that it reduces the complexity of spectrum management by removing governmental agencies from being directly involved in the completion of such transactions. The proposed model allows spectrum consumers to sell, lease or transfer the access rights to a chunk of spectrum by disaggregating, partitioning or time-sharing the corresponding spectrum in their possession. Further, we also outline an architecture in which such exclusive access rights to a portion of the spectrum could be used to regulate radio device transmission to enable proactive enforcement of the spectrum usage policies and to deter unauthorized transmissions. Overall our secondary spectrum marketplace model has the potential to reduce cost, increase spectrum efficiency, and to simplify the task of spectrum management.