Achievements

Our research in radiocommunications has developed in the last few years. We now have major collaborative contacts amongst academic researchers (including the prestigious Smith Institute for Industrial Mathematics and Systems Engineering, at Oxford) and Surrey’s own highly regarded Centre for Communications and Satellite Research. We also have a growing collections of outputs, including a multidisciplinary publication in the well-known IEE series. Finally, we have developed good links with interested commercial partners and policy makers, as evinced by the research funding we have raised over recent years.

Some highlights are detailed below:

Consultancy with the Radiocommunications Agency/Ofcom

RA Contract AY4001 (2001): A Study on the Economic Benefits of Channel Trading Construction of a detailed trading simulator, in which the effects of competition among spectrum users and limited spectrum allocations can be studied. £25K (with S. Hurley, Cardiff; and R. Leese, Smith Institute).

RA Contract AY4198 (2002): A Study and Microeconomic Model of the UK Cellular Mobile Sector. The calculation of possible equilibria of supply and demand in 2G and 3G cellular services, within a suitably parameterised model. £25K (with R. Leese, Smith Institute).

RA Visiting Economist at the Radiocommunications Agency (Rickman and Levine). June 2003-March 2004. The Economics of Radio Spectrum. Basic research to examine the extent to which a selection of models and ideas from radio-engineering literature can be combined with those from economics literature to produce new results that improve understanding of spectrum allocation policy. £48K.

Ofcom Consultancy: Cognitive Radio Technology (2006). Led by Qinetic. We provided a study on: An Economic Assessment of the Net Benefits of Introducing Cognitive Radio. This developed a methodology for estimating the welfare effects of new technologies using engineering data on their performance. The methodology can be applied to other technologies. £15K.

FP6 Project: End-to-End Reconfigurability (E2R). September 2005-December 2007. Provided a workpackage to investigate Theoretical Tools for the Economic Assessment of Radio Resources. £56K.

Published output and dissemination

The above projects (and other work) have produced seven papers at present (see Working Papers) as well as numerous research reports. These have been presented in a number of fora: for example, our work on channel trading was presented at the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference (2002) and the IEE’s Getting the Most out of the Radio Spectrum conference in London (2002); this was subsequently published as "The economics of spectrum trading", in Getting the Most out of the Radio Spectrum IEE, ISSN 0963-3308, pp. 9/1-9/5, 2002 (R. Leese, P. Levine & N. Rickman). Research for the E2R project has been published as: Microeconomics Inspired Mechanisms to Manage Dynamic Spectrum Allocation (Grandblaise, D. Kloeck, C. Renk, T. Bag, P. Levine, P. Moessner, K. Yang, J. Pan, M. Zhang, K.) has appeared in:
2nd IEEE International Symposium on Frontiers in Dynamic Spectrum Access, 2007.DySPAN2007.
Our work has also been presented at frequent project meetings with the Radiocommunications Agency, Ofcom, Qinetiq and our European partners in the E2R project mentioned above.