Tradeable Spectrum Interference Rights

Spectrum rights have gained increasing attention since Ronald Coase pointed out that the most efficient way to assign spectrum is to give it to those users who value it most through property-like rights and secondary markets. Defining spectrum rights turns out to be difficult due to the nature of electronic emissions[1]. As a result, it may be more practical to define interference rights (similar to pollution rights) rather than exclusive usage rights. Interference rights give a user the right to interfere with another user up to a specified level. In this paper, we develop the idea of a market in spectrum interference rights and, using some plausible use cases, illustrate its characteristics. The paper therefore includes a detailed description of interference rights along with some first order quantitative modelling of the use cases coupled with qualitative analysis.