Flexible Spectrum Management and the Need for Controlling Entities for Reconfigurable Wireless Systems

The concept of flexible spectrum management, which refers to a set of new and dynamic procedures and techniques for obtaining and transferring spectrum usage rights and dynamically changing the specific use of frequencies, plays an important role in fully exploiting the advantages of cognitive, reconfigurable networks and terminals. This paper provides an overview of policy trends towards flexible spectrum management in the EU, in the context of operational solutions for reconfigurability as they are currently being developed within Phase II of the EU FP6 project "end-to-end reconfigurability". It argues that, even within policy environments making increasingly more use of market based mechanisms, and even within reconfigurable systems where decision-making is highly decentralized and in which real-time mechanisms for dynamic spectrum management are used, there is a need for centralized 'controlling entities', which may fulfill a diverse set of roles.