Wireless Technology Prospects and Policy Options: Results from a National Academies Study

The paper summarizes analysis and conclusions of a study by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board's Committee on Wireless Technology Prospects and Policy Options released by the National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. It adopts as its principal goals making the effective supply of spectrum plentiful so as to make it cheaper and easier to innovate and introduce new or enhanced services and reducing the total cost - including licenses and equipment and for both end users and networks - of introducing or enhancing services. It outlines shortcomings of the current framework for wireless policy. That framework does not appear to be able to satisfy the increasing and broadening demand for wireless communication. Also, released heavily on centrally managed allocation and assignment despite growing agreement that it is inefficient and insufficiently flexible. It relies on service-specific allocations and assignments primarily by frequency band and geographic location, and does not fully exploit the opportunities presented by available and expected technology. Similarly, it does not fully reflect changes in how radios are being build and deployed now or in how they could be built and deployed in the future in response to different regulations. The paper examines 21st-century technology trends and outlines the implications of emerging technologies for spectrum management. It describes key technological advances in radios and systems of radios, including digital signal processing and radio implementation in CMOS, low cost and modularity of radios, new radio system architectures, dynamic exploitation of all degrees of freedom, and greater flexibility and adaptability. It describes the emergence of low-cost, portable radios at frequencies of 60 GHz and above, and their implications. It emphasizes an understanding of interference as a property of radio receivers and radio systems; not radio signals. It also discusses enduring technical challenges such as power consumption, nonlinearity, and the heterogeneity of capabilities in deployed radios and observes that the radio of deployment for new technologies as practical devices and systems and the varying timescales for technology turnover for different services and applications. It builds on the consideration of technology trends to outline several enablers of a more nimble, forward-looking policy in the future, including abandoning the extremes in the "property rights" versus "commons" debate, leveraging standards processes while understanding their limitations, collecting more data on spectrum use, ensuring that regulators have access to technology expertise needed to address highly technical issues, and sustaining the talent and technology base for future radio technology. Finally, the report discusses a set of forward-looking, technology-enabled policy options including the following: - Consider "open" as the default policy regime at a frequency range of approximately 20 to 100 Ghz - Use new approaches to mitigate interference and a wider set of parameters in making assignments - Introduce technological capabilities that enable more sophisticated spectrum management - Trade near-absolute outcomes for statistically acceptable outcomes - "Design for light" as well as "design for darkness" - Consider regulation of receivers and networks of transceivers - Exploit programmability so that radio behavior can be modified to comply with operating rule changes - Use adaptive and environment-sensing capabilities to reduce the need for centralized management - Establish enhanced mechanisms for dealing with legacy systems