Why is it difficult?

Following Cooper’s Law, we have doubled the capacity for wireless spectrum every 2.5 years, and we know how to do it for another 40-50 years, yet we believe we are in a world of spectrum scarcity. We need to make the spectrum more efficient. The underlying challenge lies in allocating the spectrum effectively to all the wireless devices connected to the network. As the number of devices increases, the challenge becomes even more significant. The first step towards understanding this problem is to prepare a catalog of inefficiencies in the current use of spectrum that should cover all the bands from telecommunication to Satellite and TV spectrum. It then requires developing new metrics to allocate the spectrum effectively for different applications. Several metrics could be considered that benefit a large population across the globe—for instance, affordability metrics such as average price as a percentage of lower average income.

What is the impact?

The spectrum is limited, so an efficient spectrum allocation would benefit all the applications that utilize the wireless spectrum for communication purposes. This spectrum could be shared more effectively among different radar, TV, and cellular communication applications. Research in this direction would give us a clear picture of how the spectrum is utilized today and identify under-utilized spectrum for better usage. On the other hand, over-utilized spectrum such as that used for cellular communication could meet that high demand of cellular networks with many devices could communicate simultaneously and interference-free.