Spectrum Pooling for Next Generation Public Safety Radio Systems

The dynamic spectrum access (DSA) research and development community is maturing technologies that will enable radios to share RF spectrum much more intensively. Adoption of DSA technologies by the public safety community can better align systems with the future of wireless services more generally and can contribute to making next generation public safety radio systems more robust, capable, and flexible. A critical first step toward a DSA-enabled future is to reform spectrum management in order to create spectrum pools that DSA-enabled devices such as cognitive radios (CRs) may make use of under the control of more dynamically flexible and adaptive prioritization policies than is possible with legacy technology. Appropriate reform will enable spectrum portability, facilitating the decoupling of spectrum rights from the provision of infrastructure. This paper examines the economic, policy, and market challenges of enabling spectrum pooling and portability for public safety radios.