Nemo Semret, PhD candidate, COMET group
The allocation of resources can be viewed as an exchange of commodities. The seeds of this idea are already in place in the world of radio spectrum allocation with the FCC beginning to use auctions to allocate licenses. We are now suggesting that auctions are too limiting because of the static ownership-like nature of the result, and that it be taken a step further, to the concept of Open Spectrum Access, which is essentially dynamic auctioning, where spectrum is allocated on a continual basis. The result will be open access with a market based congestion fee.
In the prototype under development, the exchange of spectrum for a given geographic area takes place in a virtual clearing house, which is implemented as a server program. Participants are located anywhere on the internet, and bidding is performed by a software agent which is a Java applet (a program embedded in an HTML document) that users obtain simply by going to a specific page on the WWW. The applet is run locally and seamlessly by their browser, and can be controlled manually or automatically by an intelligent bidding algorithm, and monitored via a graphical user interface.
The behaviour of the software agent and the economic analysis of the system are based on state-of-the-art game theory. From the policy perspective, this dynamic and open appproach to spectrum allocation will be evaluated in comparison to the current licensing and static auctioning of spectrum.