The NSC’s MIL-CIV Task Group, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), has released a new spectrum best practices document. It addresses automated spectrum access, spectrum co-existence and interference management between Tactical Data Links (TDLs) and Electronic News Gathering (ENG) Systems in the 2025-2110 MHz band. This is an important step toward establishing metrics, criteria, procedures and controls for spectrum sharing between the DoD and civilian entities.

The recommendations can be viewed here and a discussion among the group’s co-chairs is available here.

“There are a number of ways to avoid interference with spectrum sharing,” said Tommaso Melodia, professor at Northeastern University and Task Group co-chair. He overviewed three classical approaches and explained how these approaches informed the Task Group’s work.

Dr. Sastry Kompella, chief scientist at Nexcepta and co-chair of the Task Group, summarized the recommended best practices. “The themes we found were that the mechanisms need to be hybrid nature and there needs to be cooperation,” he said. “The best performance is understanding the use case thoroughly and tailoring one, or more likely a combination of these spectrum sharing approaches, to that specific use case.”

“These recommendations show the depth and breadth of the expertise in the National Spectrum Consortium,” said Dr. Apurva Mody, founder and CEO of AiRANACULUS and NSC Executive Committee member. “We really understand the problem.”

“The next step is to coordinate with broadcasters to make them aware of this capability and coordinate with DoD to see how we can exploit these capabilities and practice areas… to make it possible to share in this environment,” said Joe Molnar of the Naval Research Laboratory and the Task Group’s Chief Technical Advisor.

NSC will continue to be a convener for these important conversations about real-world spectrum solutions for government and commercial usage alike.