Overview

The purpose of this project is to design and develop a policy-driven trading framework for the assignment of access rights and authorizations through payment of a fee. In order to motivate an exploration of market-based access right assignment techniques, this project proposes the treatment of access rights as a tradable commodity, such as coffee, tin, oil and carbon credits. The precise details of that commodity will be revealed as this problem is explored. In treating access rights as such a commodity, we can attempt to create various markets on which they may be traded. Access rights carry the authority to use specific resources that are of value to the entities that participate in the market, however the resource itself is not bought and sold, but rather the right to its (possibly) exclusive use (for a defined period of time).

The first application domain we are investigating is market-based spectrum assignment. Our work allows users of spectrum to get access rights through payment of a fee, for a given period of time, and for a given frequency band and location. The key motivation behind our proposal stems from the increased complexity of new spectrum management strategies and the need for extracting the maximum benefit from the available spectrum to cope with scarcity problems. We have demonstrated that a policy-driven solution is applicable for the management of spectrum markets, and we have prototyped a decentralised and lightweight framework for implementing such markets in networked environments.