Maximizing Spectrum Availability and Exploitation: How to Maximize Spectrum Sharing Benefits to the Incumbents?

A significant portion of the radio frequency spectrum remains underutilized due to exclusive and static allocation of spectrum. Provisioning secondary access to the underutilized spectrum could be beneficial to the incumbents if they could gain significant value out of the fallow spectrum while ensuring protection of their primary services. From an incumbent perspective, the spectrum sharing approach needs to be non-harmful as well as efficient. In order to make spectrum sharing efficient, it is necessary to maximize the spectrum available for secondary access as well as maximize its exploitation. We examine the impact of the conservative assumptions that lead to lesser availability of spectrum for secondary access. The problem of joint scheduling and spectrum-access footprint allocation is at the heart of maximizing the exploitation. This problem is NP-hard and we present a suboptimal approach based on the minimal spectrum consumption cost of a spectrum-access request. In order to improve the spectrum sharing potential, we investigate the impact of the various design choices for a spectrum access mechanism (SAM). The experiments demonstrate the significance of the active role of the incumbents, the benefits of fine granular spectrum access, and the need for transceiver standards for accomplishing efficient usage of the spectrum.