Clearing secondary spectrum market with spatio-temporal partitioning

Improving spectrum utilization is essential to meet the ever growing demand for wireless spectrum. FCC currently sells licenses for spectrum bands in the "primary market" on a long term basis, and over large regions; these can lead to localized surpluses and deficits, and "secondary markets" have been proposed for trading them. Such trading can be done at different spatial and temporal granularity, and the trading in the primary and secondary markets can have significant influence on each other. This makes the task of designing effective trading schemes and evaluating their effectiveness very challenging. In this paper, we develop an integrated framework for primary and secondary markets, and use it to study dynamic spectrum access for large urban regions; our framework gives a systematic approach to couple the two markets, and study interaction between them. We use this to study the extent to which finer spatial and temporal partitioning at the secondary market level helps in increasing the spectrum utilization. We find that, in general, the spectrum utilization improves and the total cost reduces with the granularity of partitioning, but the gains depend on the particular interference model.