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At present the energy generation and distribution landscape is changing rapidly. The energy grid is becoming increasingly smart, relying on an information network for the purposes of monitoring and optimization. However, because of the particularly stringent regulatory and technical constraints posed by smart grids, it is not possible to use ordinary communication protocols. The purpose of this paper is to revisit such constraints, reviewing the various options available today to realize smart‐metering networks.

After describing the regulatory, technological and stakeholders' constraints, the authors provide a taxonomy of network technologies, discussing their suitability and weaknesses in the context of smart‐metering systems. The authors also give a snapshot of the current standardization panorama, identifying key differences among various geographical regions.

It is found that the field of smart‐metering networks still consists of a fragmented set of standards and solutions, leaving open a number of issues relating to the design and deployment of suitable systems.

This paper addresses the need to better understand state‐of‐the‐art and open issues in the fast‐evolving area of smart energy grids, with particular attention to the challenges faced by communication engineers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief history on the Part 15 rules.

The approach takes the form of a systematic overview of spectrum policy applied to rules governing unlicensed devices since 1938.

Much of the policy debate in the last decade has been couched in terms of how spectrum rights are defined. The jurisprudence underlying the Part 15 rules is that unlicensed spectrum is not spectrum at all. Rather, the rules concentrate on the effective power and modulation characteristic of the radio devices themselves. Perhaps this is the next great idea for all spectrum policy: spectrum does not really exist. It is merely an idea – a concept – a way of describing and organizing the physical world in people's minds and actions. Spectrum is a legal and engineering construct to control for an immutable fundamental physical property.

Research limitations encompass typical limitations of a case study of a historical event.

The paper informs ongoing efforts to update and modernize spectrum policy.

The paper provides a retrospective view of spectrum policy.

Spectrum regulations have major impact on the development and deployment of innovative technologies. Current regulations for license-exempt radio spectrum generally are given in terms of technology-related criteria. This paper aims to propose a set of metrics that can be used to define technology-agnostic spectrum regulations which encourage rather than restrict technology innovation.

This paper builds on and expands two other papers on regulatory criteria for license-exempt spectrum which define metrics for spectrum loading and spectrum sharing efficiency. Here, we add metrics for Block Edge Masks and for medium access adaptivity. This gives a complete toolset for the management of radio spectrum.

Because of the diversity of use of license-exempt spectrum, performance criteria must be formulated in terms that abstract from the details of equipment properties. Instead, they must be formulated in terms of spectrum utilization dimensions: RF power, time and frequency occupation. The result is a concise set of metrics that can be applied to the regulation or management of shared spectrum.

The mathematics used in this paper deal with high-level parameters and may ignore factors that are important in certain cases and may require refinement.

The implications of the proposed metrics include an increase emphasis on the objectives of spectrum policy and on measures to assure efficient spectrum utilization both within frequency bands and between adjacent bands.

There are no social implications the authors are aware of.

The originality of this work lies in recognizing that the extreme variety of devices and mode of operation deployed in license-exempt spectrum calls for spectrum management criteria that are technology agnostic.

The aim of this paper is to consider whether it is possible to identify the future spectrum bands most suitable for the Internet of Things (IoT) from the operating factors of a novel set of radio services for a very wide range of applications, as an aid to policy makers now facing decisions in this area.

The approach uses characteristics of spectrum bands against the applications’ requirements to focus on specific major traits that can be matched.

The main choice factors for spectrum are the practical application needs and the network cost model, and these are fairly useful as matching parameters. It is forecast that multiple bands will be needed and that these should be of a licence-exempt form to seed the unfettered innovation of IoT technologies and pre-empt the formation of significant market power by concerned interests.

The way in which spectrum is allocated today will need to be reconsidered, in the light of evolving IoT requirements, which will have increasing economic and social impacts. Policy recommendations for IoT spectrum demands are outlined, and key policy options to ensure a dynamic and trustworthy development of the IoT are put forward. For instance, regulatory barriers globally will need to be removed.

Current interests in the technical requirements of the IoT have not yet given a suitable analysis of the potential spectrum uses, because too often, it is assumed that previous models of spectrum allocation will continue in the future, without consideration of the economic pressures and social context.

The last decade has seen increasing advocacy for, and interest in the use of white space in the broadcasting bands by providers of wireless broadband services. This paper aims to discuss the scope in Australia for “symbiotic” and “invasive” white space devices to operate in the UHF band after digital switchover and speculate about longer term trends.

The authors draw from their analysis of recent regulatory decisions to explain how the parameters established for channel planning naturally conduce to the development of large white spaces. They then identify emerging opportunities for white space usage in the reduced UHF band allocated to digital television services as well as in nearby guard bands.

The article's analysis suggests that there is considerable scope for white space devices to operate in Australia – even in the context of a reduced UHF band following analog switch off. Furthermore, the authors argue that the development of complementary business models could see off any perceived conflict between intensive white space usage and the long‐term benefit of both broadcasters and telecommunications operators.

It is timely for proponents of white space usage to establish regulatory arrangements that will allow intensive use of those white spaces. Current FCC proposals to base the regulatory framework on spectrum co‐sharing between broadcasters and white space broadband providers may lead to similar, yet distinct, opportunities in the USA as well.

There is a surprising paucity of published information worldwide regarding white space regulation. This article provides an in‐depth discussion of the main parameters driving white space opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility to replace radio equipment compliance requirements based on equipment parameters with a set of simple metrics that accurately reflects spectrum utilization and spectrum-sharing efficiency.

The approach taken is to go back to the basic factors that determine radio system behavior in a shared spectrum environment: radio frequency power, duty cycle and frequency occupation. By normalizing these parameters, device specificity is avoided and a statistical perspective on spectrum utilization and sharing becomes possible.

The analysis shows that two technology-neutral metrics would be adequate to govern spectrum utilization and sharing: a spectrum utilization metric and a spectrum-sharing efficiency metric. These metrics form the core of regulatory requirements for shared frequency bands. Each shared frequency band could be assigned criteria based on these metrics that take into account the types of applications for which that band will be used.

This work is a first step that identifies the main factors that affect shared spectrum usage from a statistical point of view. More work is needed on the relationship between real-world interference and its abstraction in the spectrum-sharing rules.

The metrics proposed could be considered as the basis for a new approach to the regulation of the license-exempt spectrum, and, by extension, as the basis for generic compliance criteria. Their use would facilitate the compliance assessment of software-defined radio technology.

This work has no direct social implications.

This paper combines new work on spectrum utilization criteria with extensions of previous work on spectrum-sharing efficiency into a comprehensive proposal for a new approach to the regulation of the license-exempt spectrum.

Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) first wave started with tracking services for better inventory management mainly using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Later on, monitoring services became one of the major interests, including sensing technologies, and then more actuation for remote control-type of IoT applications such as smart homes, smart cities and Industry 4.0. In this paper, the authors focus on the RFID technology impairment. They propose to take advantage of the mature IoT technologies that offer native service discovery such as blutooth or LTE D2D ProSe or Wifi Direct. Using the automatic service discovery in the new framework will make heterogeneous readers aware of the presence of other readers and this will be used by the proposed distributed algorithm to better control the multiple RFID reader interference problem. The author clearly considers emerging Industry 4.0 use case, where RFID technology is of major interest for both identification and tracking. To enhance the RFID tag reading performance, collisions in the RFID frequency should be minimized with reader-to-reader coordination protocols. In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation.

In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation to study its behavior in very dense and heterogeneous RFID environments. Specifically, the author explores the coexistence of powerful static readers and small mobile readers, comparing the proposal with a standard ETSI CSMA method. The proposal reduces significantly the number of access attempts, which are resource-expensive for the readers. The results show that the objectives of DiSim are met, producing low reader collision probability and, however, having lower average readings per reader per time.

DiSim is evaluated with the ETSI standard LBT protocol for multi-reader environments in several environments with varied levels of reader and tag densities, having both static powerful RFID readers and heterogeneous randomly moving mobile RFID readers. It effectively reduces the number of backoffs or contentions for the RFID channel. This has high reading success rate due to the avoided collisions; however, the readers are put to wait, and DiSim has less average readings per reader per time. As an additional side evaluation, the ETSI standard LBT mechanism was found to present a good performance for low-density mid-coverage scenarios, however, with high variability on the evaluation results.

To show more results, the author needs to do real experimentation in a warehouse, such as Amazon warehouse, where he expects to have more and more robots, start shelves, automatic item finding on the shelve, etc.

Future work considers experimentation in a real warehouse equipped with heterogeneous RFID readers and real-time analysis of RFID reading efficiency also combined with indoor localization and navigation for warehouse mobile robots.

More automatization is expected in the future; this work makes the use of RFID technology more efficient and opens more possibilities for services deployment in different domains such as the industry which was considered not only in this paper but also in smart cites and smart homes.

Compared to the literature, the proposal offers the advantage to not be dependent on a centralized server controlling the RFID readers. It also offers the possibility for an existing RFID architecture to add new readers from a different manufacturer, as the readers using the approach will have the possibility to discover the capabilities of the new interaction other RFID readers. This solution takes advantage of the available proximity service that will be more and more offered by the IoT technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to propose technology-independent metrics for measuring spectrum utilization efficiency and spectrum sharing which could prove useful in spectrum management. Radio spectrum is considered a scarce resource. The rapid rise in all kinds of wireless devices emphasizes the need for spectrum usage efficiency and spectrum sharing. Notably in license exempt spectrum, the increased density of radio devices requires new methods of evaluating their performance.

The authors go back to the fundamentals of spectrum utilization and show that under high usage conditions, wireless network performance is interference limited. The impact of interference depends both on the environment and on the type of modulation used. The authors use these factors to derive the above metrics.

The main findings of this work are metrics for spectrum utilization and sharing that are technology-independent and therefore widely applicable, notably to license exempt spectrum. These metrics provide increased visibility of receiver performance in determining spectrum use. The authors also find that the capacity of a wireless network is for all practical purposes unlimited – provided the appropriate choices of the technical parameters are made, recognizing the impact of the propagation environment.

Because the authors proceed from simplifying assumptions, detailed analysis and prediction of spectrum-sharing cases may require additional parameters to be added to the equations given.

The results of this work have potential application in spectrum management and in the development of regulatory requirements for license exempt spectrum.

New in this paper is the derivation of spectrum utilization and sharing metrics from first principles that allow different technologies to be compared. The authors also show that, given the right choice of technical parameters, the capacity of wireless networks is practically unlimited.