A Context-Aware Dynamic Spectrum Access System for Spectrum Research and Development

Our hunger for data has grown tremendously over the years which has led to a demand for the increase in the available radio spectrum for communications. The Federal Communications Commission in the United States allowed for the sharing of the CBRS band (3550-3700 MHz) a few years ago. Since then, research has been done by both industry and academia to identify similar opportunities in other radio bands as well. This research is, however, being hampered due to a lack of experimental frameworks where the various aspects of spectrum sharing can be studied. To this end, we propose to develop an open-source spectrum access system that incorporates context awareness and multi-band operational support and serves as an RandD tool for the research community. We have developed a novel Prioritization Framework that takes the current operational context of each user into account to determine their relative priority, within or outside their user class/group, for transmission in the network. We also introduce a Policy Engine for the configuration and management of dynamic policies (or rules) for defining the relationships between the various forms of context information and their relative impact on a user's overall priority. We have performed several experiments to show how context awareness impacts the spectrum sharing efficiency and quality of service. Due to its modular and extensible nature, we expect that this tool will be used by researchers and policy-makers to implement their own policies and algorithms and test their efficacy in a simulated radio environment.