QUASAR scenarios for white space assessments and exploitation Jonas Kronander Ericsson Research – Wireless Access Networks Ericsson AB Stockholm, Sweden jonas.kronander@ericsson.com Jens Zander, Ki Won Sung Wireless@KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden jenz@kth.se, sungkw@kth.se Maziar Nekovee BT Innovate and Design British Telecom Suffolk, UK maziar.nekovee@bt.com Seong-Lyun Kim School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering Yonsei University Seoul, Korea slkim@yonsei.ac.kr Andreas Achtzehn Institute for Networked Systems RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany aac@inets.rwth-aachen.de Abstract—This paper presents a unifying scenario classification model and a selection of scenarios, developed within the EU FP7 QUASAR project to study secondary spectrum usage. The classification model categorizes scenarios from technical, regulatory, and economic perspective. It enables the derivation of the most promising scenarios of secondary spectrum access: Cellular and WiFi-like usage of TV white spaces, wireless backhauling using secondary spectrum access, license exempt use of the radar bands, use of the aeronautical bands for mobile broadband and cognitive machine-to-machine communication. These scenarios are presented in more detail along with motivations of why they are interesting to study further. The scenarios will provide the basis for the future work within the QUASAR project, which has the overall objective to assess the amount of useful spectrum opportunities for secondary spectrum access. Keywords-secondary spectrum access, white space, assessment, scenario classification model, scenario I. INTRODUCTION The need for more radio spectrum resources to fulfil the demands of the rapidly growing mobile and converged broadband access services is evident. Abundant and fast access to spectrum has three main advantages: It fosters rapid innovation in wireless systems and services lowering entry barriers to the market; it enables affordable broadband access to all, and; it potentially improves services and business models of established mobile operators. Secondary use of already licensed, but underutilized spectrum allotments has been proposed as one solution to increase spectrum availability. Low spectrum occupancy in a number of measurement campaigns worldwide has been the basis for claims of large gains in spectrum efficiency by cognitive radio and opportunistic spectrum access, see e.g. [1], [2]. However, little research has been done to substantiate these claims with technological, regulatory or economic feasibility studies. For discussions on issues and feasibility analysis of the generic problems related to secondary spectrum access see [3], [4]. Except for secondary use of TV white space, which has been extensively studied (e.g. [5] and references therein), there are few concrete studies on other sharing scenarios. The EU FP7 QUASAR [6] project aims at bridging this gap between the claims made in conventional cognitive radio research and practical implementation by assessing and quantifying the “real-world” benefits of secondary (opportunistic) access to primary (licensed) spectrum. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In section II the scenario classification model that we base our scenario selection on is introduced. Then, the various derived scenarios are presented and motivated. The paper is concluded by some remarks on the intended future use of the scenarios within the QUASAR project. II. SCENARIO CLASSIFICATION MODEL To the end of identifying similarities and differences in the future implementation and to cover the waterfront of secondary spectrum usage, the QUASAR consortium has developed a unified scenario classification model. The model categorizes particular bands, primary and secondary systems along diverse aspects.