How to define utility for use in practical wireless network resource trading platforms

Excessive usage of wirelessly networked equipment in densely populated areas increasingly leads to performance degradation due to interference and traffic congestion. This is particularly the case in unmanaged environments such as unlicensed frequency bands. One solution is to enable and automate constructive collaboration between the actors, leading to spectrum sharing based on trading and consensus. Various methods, including game theory, can be used to understand how actors interact and make decisions on how to obtain the highest possible utility. In this paper we address the question how to define the utility to be negotiated by these actors. A bottom-up approach of this issue is a hard, joint engineering, regulatory, social, and economic problem. Instead, we present the outcome of a survey study of 68 wireless communications and networking experts whom we asked about their opinion on the matter. The experts quite strongly agree that most interference mitigation research still needs to be focused on the 2.4 GHz unlicensed band and IEEE 802.11b/g technology. They thus acknowledge that 2.4 GHz will remain the preferred band of communication for unmanaged wireless communication, and that many more modern versions of IEEE 802.11 will fall back to b/g when the conditions for communication get tough. Throughput is the most important utility to be negotiated, recognizing that to increase the actors' satisfaction effectively, physical-layer parameters are not the only factors to be considered in the utility function.