Spectrum Agile Radio: A Society of Machines with Value-Orientation - Invited Paper

Our radio spectrum is not efficiently utilized because of the complicated and time-consuming radio regulation process. In this paper, technologies to help overcoming this barrier, namely, spectrum agile radios, are discussed. Spectrum agile radios operate in the radio spectrum that was originally licensed to other (incumbent, primary) radio services. A spectrum agile radio seeks unused radio resources and communicates using these opportunities, without interfering with the operation of licensed radios. We discuss two main problems: protection of incumbents, and coexistence of agile radios. Spectrum sharing among different radio systems can be understood as a scenario forming a society of independent decision-makers. Therefore, basic concepts to classify social action that are taken from social science are applied to define system strategy rules. The rules represent algorithms for decision-making entities (referred to as actors) that reside in the radio systems. For a simple scenario of spectrum sharing, we investigate the need for regulation as opposed to voluntary rules.