To simplify it, while the sharing of bandwidth and links has enabled Internet traffic, compared to circuit switching, in the public wireless communications space, the sharing of radio spectrum has not yet happened, leading to huge losses of capacity and inefficiencies. It has also led to turf wars between TV, mobile communications, and specific uses such as emergency networks. Researchers in telecommunications economics, economists, and regulators have been agonizing over how to price and whom to allocate spectrum to. This short volume, a well-structured eye-opener, describes several schemes for enabling spectrum sharing. In a way, it addresses the forward-driven change in radio spectrum management, which new demands and new uses will require, that is, in the context of 5G services as well as in the run-up to the Internet of Things (IoT). The book is also valuable in that it presents alternative techniques, with algorithmic specifications as well as performance comparisons, as this is obviously a multiple criteria area.

After a good, factual introductory chapter, the following four chapters survey the principles and modeling of several schemes: opportunistic spectrum access, incentivized cooperative dynamic spectrum access, dynamic spectrum co-access, and on-demand spectrum access, plus some remarks on licensed share access. The book also positions the more academic cognitive radio research with respect to these four approaches, which are more likely to serve as a basis for regulations and the evolution of International Telecommunication Union (ITU) treaties. The introduction also clearly explains why present-day static spectrum allocation still has a role, and lets the proposed schemes become relevant in the “white spaces” linked to unused spectrum in the temporal, spatial, and frequency domains.

The volume lacks a survey chapter on the links between modulation, coding, propagation, and signal interference at different wavelengths, to justify the formation of the attributes of the links that then get allocated by different schemes and architectures. This would be needed to convince regulators and operators, who are responsible for dependability and security.

Otherwise, this is an important volume with technical, regulatory, and financial implications, and thus is a must-read for a wide and diverse audience of specialists, graduate students, engineers, and economists. Despite its short length, the volume would have benefited from having one combined list of references and an index.