Sicker, D. C., Grunwald, D., Anderson, E., Doerr, C., Munsinger, B., Sheth, A. (2006). Examining The Wireless Commons. The 34th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy, Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC), Arlington, VA. http://web.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2006/576/proposal.pdf
This academic article is a comprehensive introduction to open spectrum and wireless commons issues. The existence of an open spectrum has helped to fuel the wireless broadband movement in the US, and future regulatory actions affecting the open spectrum are important to the future of community and municipal wireless. The article reviews the debate about whether the unlicensed spectrum is plagued by a potential “tragedy of the commons” in which too many users make it useless. It finds that, despite the heat of the debate, current evidence of a tragedy in the wireless commons is mostly anecdotal, and that a common metric that leads people to believe there is a tragedy does not, in reality, demonstrate this. The article also addresses the following issues: -What defines a tragedy in unlicensed spectrum. -How system architecture determines how rapidly a tragedy occurs. -How serious the problem of a “tragedy” is. -The difference between tragedies that occur as a result of radio frequency interference and those that occur because of the design of the protocols associated with specific technologies. -The influence of architectural choices on the performance of systems in the unlicensed bands. The article notes that: “Defining what constitutes a tragedy is more complex than it might first appear. The answer includes such dynamic factors as: the density of the devices, the environmental conditions, the usage patterns, the application demands, the protocols employed and the existence of other interferers. Modeling the problem is also difficult in that it requires combining theoretical capacity models with geographic information systems and other dynamic factors in a way that connects micro and macro models into a realistic depiction of the problem.”