The Cost of Knowing : An Economic Evaluation of Context Acquisition in DSA Systems

Much of the research in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has focused on the details of the enabling technologies. While this has been quite useful in establishing the technical feasibility of DSA systems, it has missed an important aspect of the overall DSA problem space: in order for operators, regulators and users to be interested in deploying DSA based networks, the expected costs should be in proportion to what the users are realistically willing to pay for services. Consequently, it is important to conduct cost estimates for different DSA approaches in parallel with the technical research. In this paper, we will explore how the cost experienced by primary and secondary users can influence their incentives for participation in DSA. To do this, we compare the costs and cost structures of four context awareness approaches from each of them. The costs we will consider are incremental capital costs over a basic software radio using four different context acquisition approaches (sensing, databases, sensor networks, and cooperative sharing). Since DSA is still a relatively new research field, there is a lot of uncertainty associated with incremental cost analyses. As a result, the cost analysis is parameterized to allow for explicit reasoning about the bounds of cost components