Enabling Innovation in Spectrum Management

We argue that the capital expenditures made by an individual mobile network operator is extremely high and risky. Also, radio spectrum sharing still lacks intelligence in the current architecture of mobile networks and needs to be rethought. We propose that a goal for the future mobile network architecture that shall be able to free mobile network operators from having to hold spectrum licenses and natively enable intelligent radio spectrum sharing among multiple mobile network operators. On the basis of the design principles, the duty of a single mobile network operator is split into two roles, one focuses on infrastructure development, the other only contains authorizations on the radio spectrum usage. We introduce a new role to the mobile network architecture, named Spectrum Trader, is a primary broker for spectrum trading, and it is used to coordinate with the demand-side requests and the supply-side resources to drive demand in a real-time bidding manner. We also introduce a concept of spectrum embedding that shall enable efficient and intelligent spectrum allocation by recommending the right spectrum bands based on user scenario. Finally, several challenges that need to be addressed in practical deployment are investigated.