Government policy and the comparative merits of alternative governance regimes for wireless services

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of policy instruments (entry restrictions, power limits and device robustness requirements) on welfare for two types of wireless networks (with and without backbone relay) through economic modeling. The study finds that (1) robustness requirements are undesirable; (2) the potential welfare improvement associated with power limits increases with the number of firms in the market; (3) when set inadequately, all three policy instruments can cause significant welfare loss; (4) comparison of a prototype property rights regime and a prototype commons regime suggests, given the same power restrictions, the property rights regime tends to outperform the commons regime as long as the number of firms is not significantly smaller (in relative terms) than the optimal number of firms, which itself is a small fraction of the open commons equilibrium number of firms.

Spectrum Usage Models for the Analysis, Design and Simulation of Cognitive Radio Networks

“…Figure 3.1 shows the different geographical locations considered in this study, which embrace a wide variety of scenarios including indoor (location 2) and outdoor environments at high points (location 1), narrow streets (locations 3-7), between buildings (locations [8][9][10] and in open areas (locations [11][12]. The considered measurement locations represent various physical scenarios of practical interest that embrace a wide range of receiving conditions and levels of radio propagation blocking, ranging from direct line of sight to severely blocked and faded signals.…”

“…The current spectrum underutilization has motivated an important number of activities and initiatives in the regulatory [6][7][8][9][10][11][12], economic [13][14][15][16][17] and research communities in searching for better spectrum management policies. In this context, the term Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has been coined to refer to innovative solutions proposing a procedure or scheme to share spectrum among wireless operators, technologies and services in order to increase the overall spectrum utilization.…”

“…The measurement locations considered in this study embrace a rich diversity of practical scenarios in urban and sub-urban areas. The scenarios analyzed in urban areas are illustrated in Figure 3.1 and include various locations within the Campus Nord of Universitat Politèc-nica de Catalunya (UPC) in urban Barcelona, not only outdoor high points (location 1), but also indoor environments (location 2) as well as outdoor locations at the ground level in narrow streets (locations 3-7), between buildings (locations [8][9][10] and in open areas (locations [11][12]. For outdoor high point measurements (location 1), the equipment was placed in the rooftop of the three-floor building belonging to the Department of Signal Theory and Communications of UPC (latitude: 41 • 23' 20" North; longitude: 2 • 6' 43" East; altitude: 175 meters).…”

“…t (msecs) can also be employed to determine when a primary transmitter is active and therefore the length of its activity periods F L (T 1 ), although in this case the length of the real busy and idle periods at short time scales cannot be determined due to the limited time resolution 8 . High time resolution measurements can then be employed to extract the real channel occupancy pattern in terms of busy and idle periods when a primary transmitter is active, i.e.…”

“…The above modeling approach is suitable for channels that remain inactive for relatively long periods of time until a transmitter becomes active, in which case a sequence of shorter busy/idle periods follows as depicted in Figure 8.14(a). Based on the channel occupancy patterns observed for various radio technologies, it can be concluded that this modeling approach is appropriate for channels of amateur bands, paging bands, PMR/PAMR bands and 8 The employed spectrum analyzer, with the selected configuration, sweeps at an approximated rate of 25 ms per megahertz of scanned bandwidth. This means, for instance, that a 200-kHz GSM/DCS channel is observed for a time period of 5 ms (i.e., more than one GSM/DCS frame) and a 1.728-MHz DECT channel is observed for several DECT frames.…”