# A Spectrum Management Platform Architecture to Enable a Sharing Economy in 6G
## 3 Trading and Allocating Spectrum as Part of a Sharing Economy in 6G  
### Principles and Definitions  
In this section, we introduce a new way of sharing the spectrum, based on the principles of the sharing economy paradigm, and its foundation in the dynamic and distributed matching of offer and demand of spectrum resources. The sharing economy is defined as creating a business model allowing consumers to be paid for providing a service similar to what they receive. It is currently considered among the most innovative and efficient sharing economic models. The strength of this concept comes from its ability to bypass traditional intermediaries and use Internet platforms to connect consumers to suppliers of goods and services. It has helped to increase the capacity of markets, bring down prices and enhance the reliability of services.  
The concept is strongly rooted in the observation that many economic resources are more and more provided by the consumers themselves (hence the popular term \"prosumers\") instead of by large incumbent operators. We also see such a trend with wireless communications. With the arrival of private picocells and the ability of most Wi-Fi end-user devices to provide hotspot services to other devices, many users not only have a demand for wireless capacity but are also able to offer it to others. Our aim, therefore, is to design a spectrum-trading platform that matches offer and demand locally and dynamically, provides broker deals, and aids business partners in executing, securing, validating, and verifying these deals. Of course, similar wireless spectrum-trading platforms can already be found in the literature [24] and there is an established discussion on so-called 'Spectrum as a Service' approaches [25; 26] but our novelty as outlined in the previous section, is the inclusion of any potential connectivity provider in our system and the flexibility to cover a broad range of technologies and use cases.  
Our vision is, therefore, to allow any entity that owns or manages a wireless network (which we call an \"operator\" in the remainder of this paper) to trade its spectrum resource with any user in a range that requires it. A wireless network can be licenced or unlicenced, including both Wi-Fi and IoT deployments and cellular networks. In its extreme, such a trading platform would make the current market-oriented licencing a system of the past and, while this may sound controversial, it is a normal cause of things in economics: after demand is created by rolling out services by government-owned or -regulated monopolistic industry, a deregulated and distributed market can take over. We are currently witnessing this with taxi rides, power generation, public transport, space exploration, etc. As illustrated by the example in Figure 1, our vision is to make radio resources universally available for trading and sharing between any operator and 6G users. Moreover, note that we apply the following definitions:  
* Spectrum Trading is the act of voluntary matching of offer and demand of spectral resources between parties acting in a common geographical space in which spectral resources are scarce and contended. The parties are treated as economic actors and trading may or may not result in consensus and a joint agreement. Trading may or may not be galvanised by a broker;
* Spectrum Allocation is the act of allocating spectral resources offered by one or more parties to parties who demand spectral resources. Ideally, the allocation follows from the consensus resulting from the previous step of trading and correctly executes the joint agreement;
* Spectrum Sharing is the most likely result of Spectrum Allocation: parties are sharing the spectral resources as agreed upon. Alternatively, the spectrum is not shared, and one party consumes it all. While a radio resource management approach that makes our vision possible will be presented in Section 5, in the remainder of this section, we explore the requirements and potential technical approaches to achieve this.