Spectrum Measurement Markets for Tiered Spectrum Access

The recent framework for tiered spectrum sharing in the 3.5 GHz band allows for environment sensing capability operators (ESCs) to measure spectrum occupancy so as to enable commercial users to use this spectrum when federal incumbent users are not present. Motivated by this, we consider a scenario in which two spectrum access firms (SAs) seek to access a shared band of spectrum and must in turn purchase spectrum measurements from one of two ESCs. Given the purchased measurements, the SAs compete on price to serve customers. We consider both the case where both SAs seek to access the same shared band of spectrum and the case where they each have a portion of this band that they can exclusively use on a secondary basis. We study how differences in licensing approaches, the ESC's prices and the quality of the spectrum measurements impact the resulting market equilibrium between the SAs. In particular, we show that when the SAs share a single band of spectrum, having different qualities of measurements available to different SAs can lead to better economic welfare. When each has a separate licensed band, this difference does not matter.