Lights and sirens broadband — How spectrum pooling, cognitive radio, and dynamic prioritization modeling can empower emergency communications, restore sanity and save billions

In the United States, the public safety community is involved in a protracted debate with the FCC and commercial wireless industry over spectrum in the 700 MHz band. Public Safety claims to need both the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST) allocation of 10 MHz and the adjacent D-Block allocation of 10 MHz to build a viable nationwide public safety broadband network. The Industry and the FCC are pushing back against this argument, citing a lack of evidence that public safety's needs justify this additional spectrum, and arguing that public safety needs can be satisfied by receiving roaming rights on the D-Block operator's commercial network for emergencies. Long Term Evolution (LTE) standards have been adopted and commercial development of LTE networks is proceeding. These networks provide advanced capability to use cognitive radio, dynamic spectrum access and most importantly provide prioritization and pre-emption of traffic based on user role, application, network conditions and other factors. Public Safety has adopted LTE as its next generation standard for broadband networks. Pooling the two blocks of spectrum and providing a single robust network nationwide, which can serve both the public and public safety with robust prioritization and pre-emption rules enforced by LTE technology would save billions of dollars of public and private funds and provide both the public and public safety with more capacity, more flexibility and more interoperability than two separate networks. Cognitive Radio can be employed to create the dynamic policy front end (a Cognitive Policy Model (CPM)) to regulate emergency redistribution of spectrum, and ensure that all spectrum is put to its highest and best use all the time without necessitating the expense of two overlaid network infrastructures. This paper examines the possible advantages of spectrum pooling, flexing and sharing of infrastructure as well as the challenges to shifting “back” to a partnership policy for commercial and public safety broadband spectrum holders.