WASHINGTON, D.C.—Following a recent workshop on the potential impact of AI on the communications sector, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to launch a Notice of Inquiry into non-federal spectrum usage and explore how new data sources, methods, and technologies like AI would allow the agency to better manage increasingly congested commercial spectrum.
This Notice of Inquiry will explore how new tools can promote effective spectrum management and identify new opportunities for innovation, the FCC said.
As the radiofrequency environment becomes more congested, leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence to understand spectrum usage and draw insights from large and complex datasets can help facilitate more efficient spectrum use, including new spectrum sharing techniques and approaches to enable co-existence among users and services, the agency said.
In announcing the effort, FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel referred to the July joint workshop with the National Science Foundation that explored the potential impact of AI on communications networks. While “much of the news about AI is dark,” “from my perch as the head of our Nation’s expert agency on communications, I can’t help but be an optimist about the future of AI," she said.
Much of that optimism, she added, is based on the potential of using AI to better manage the growing demands that are being put on commercial spectrum.
“Right now, so many of our commercial spectrum bands are growing crowded,” Rosenworcel said. “Hundreds of millions of wireless connections—from smartphones to medical sensors—are using this invisible infrastructure. And that number is growing fast.”
This congestion could “make it harder to make room in our skies for new technologies and new services,” unless the FCC develops “smarter policies” and “efforts that facilitate more efficient use of this scarce resource," she explained.
AI, she added, has the potential of helping improve the way spectrum is used.
“A large wireless provider’s network can generate several million performance measurements every minute,” she said. “Using those measurements, machine learning can provide insights that help better understand network usage, support greater spectrum efficiency, and improve resiliency by making it possible to heal networks on their own.”
Such technologies could produce a shift in spectrum utilization from the current policy of licensing “large slices of our airwaves and [coming] up with unlicensed policies for joint use in others,” she said. “This scheme is not truly dynamic. But with demands on our airwaves growing with the internet of things, we want to better understand spectrum utilization in geography, frequency, and time. This is the kind of data that could help make our policies smarter and more effective. It could also help support new cognitive abilities that could teach our wireless devices to manage transmissions and avoid harmful interference on their own. In other words, smarter radios using AI can work with each other without a central authority dictating the best use of spectrum in every environment.”
Rosenworcel also noted that Federal agencies, including Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation have been supporting research into “the development of new radio network technologies" and that DARPA had sponsored a "Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which invited innovators to design new wireless networks using AI.”
“DARPA’s Colosseum network emulator is now hosted by Northeastern University in Boston, in partnership with the National Science Foundation,” she said. “At the FCC, we’ve supported these efforts by establishing special wireless Innovation Zones in Boston to support continued work with the emulator and in Salt Lake City, where the National Science Foundation has set up outdoor, city-scale wireless test beds. But I believe we can do more to increase our understanding of spectrum utilization and support the development of AI tools in wireless networks. That is what today’s inquiry is all about. I look forward to the record that develops because I believe if we do this right, we can help turn spectrum scarcity into abundance.”
