Keith Gremban

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is committed to ensuring that the government’s use of this valuable resource is as efficient and effective as possible. But what does it mean to be an efficient user of spectrum? And how can future systems make better use of spectrum? NTIA’s research laboratory, the Institute for Telecommunications Sciences (ITS), digs into these questions in a new report providing a thorough survey of the history of spectrum efficiency.

Any agreement to share spectrum bands will require reliable predictions of how that spectrum will perform in the real world. The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) recently took a major step toward a more collaborative approach to research in this area by publicly releasing an advanced software model for radio wave propagation in urban environments.

This software can be used by consumers, engineers, scientists and others to explore the behavior of radio waves interacting with buildings, trees, and other environmental features. ITS released the software to the public by publishing source code (link is external) on GitHub, an online platform for open-source code. Posting to GitHub will allow researchers to use and modify the code as they wish, as well as collaborate with other researchers and avoid duplicating efforts. ITS hopes that making its source code freely available can advance development of widely accepted propagation models.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) has been working to better understand how to factor in clutter when analyzing and predicting the behavior of radio waves.

ITS engineer Chriss Hammerschmidt presented a paper earlier this week on "Extracting Clutter Metrics From Mobile Propagation Measurements in the 1755-1780 MHz Band" at MILCOM 2016, an international conference for military communications. The paper describes spectrum measurements ITS took during 2015 to inform and validate new radio wave propagation prediction models. Propagation models, mathematical algorithms that predict the behavior of radio waves, are an essential enabler for spectrum sharing. ITS and its predecessor labs within the Department of Commerce have been developing and improving propagation models since about 1909. But increased demand for spectrum, advances in technology, and the tremendous increase in the everyday spectrum usage (sometimes referred to as the "noise floor"), means that there are tremendous potential benefits from more research and testing to improve the accuracy of existing propagation models. As the telecommunications industry moves into the future with new technologies like 5G, ever more detailed models of clutter loss will be required to facilitate spectrum sharing.

This set of measurements is a first step on the path to making spectrum sharing as efficient as possible. Tremendous opportunities remain, however, for investment in propagation research and testing to achieve even greater efficiencies in our use of limited spectrum resources.

What are the best practices for isolating an interfering signal and tracking it to its origin, and what should the consequences be for the offending transmitter to prevent future interference? Such legal and regulatory issues will be explored at 2016’s International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART), on Aug. 1-3 in Westminster (CO).

ISART is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Communications, a joint effort between National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). ISART – now in its 15th year – will once again bring together the world's experts on advanced radio systems development. The theme of ISART 2016 is Spectrum Forensics, defined as the spectrum measurements that support interference monitoring, investigation, and enforcement. ISART 2016 will be particularly appealing to engineers, mathematicians, and others who are interested in understanding the application of specific measurement and monitoring techniques to spectrum sharing analyses. During the three-day conference, participants will hear presentations that explore the implications of technological advancements on policies related to the forensic analysis of radio interference; hear about the results of spectrum monitoring efforts in Europe, the United States, and Canada; discuss research in spectrum monitoring using unmanned aircraft systems; hear a report on the state-of-the-art in the technologies and standards that make spectrum forensics possible; and identify gaps where future development and standardization are needed.