Operations Research Enables Auction to Repurpose Television Spectrum for Next-Generation Wireless Technologies
Abstract
In 2017, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission completed the world’s first two-sided spectrum auction, reclaiming radio frequency spectrum from television broadcasters to meet exploding demand for mobile broadband, 5G, and other wireless services. Operations research—including a customized series of optimization models, decompositions, cuts, heuristics, large neighborhood searches, and a portfolio of propositional satisfiability solvers whose parameters were determined by machine learning—was essential to the design and implementation of the auction. The auction repurposed 84 megahertz of spectrum and generated gross revenue of nearly $20 billion, providing more than $10 billion in capital for the broadcast television industry and over $7 billion for federal deficit reduction.
