Seeing the bigger picture: Context-aware regulations

The TV whitespaces represent an incredible opportunity for innovation. Along with this opportunity come significant challenges: the whitespaces are very heterogeneous in terms of channel availability as well as quality. This poses a challenge to anyone wishing to achieve uniform or even similar quality of service nationwide. In this paper, we consider using heterogeneity in the emissions limits to counteract the inherent heterogeneity of the whitespaces, ultimately resulting in a more homogeneous quality of service for secondary users. However, heterogeneity cannot be added to regulations in a haphazard manner. Rather, it must be carefully crafted as a result of looking at the bigger picture and fully exploiting the capabilities of databases. Databases should not be seen as a necessary evil but rather as an exciting opportunity for improvement and innovation. In particular, rather than being viewed as a simple repository of data, the “database” can be viewed as a cloud-based entity that reports the result of a default kind of Coasian-bargaining that could be expected to occur among frequency-agile radios. We conclude by showing a few small examples of positive heterogeneity as it applies to real-world data for the TV whitespaces in parts of the United States.