Title: A New Taxonomy for Symbiotic EM Sensors,
Abstract: It is clear that the EM spectrum is now rapidly reaching saturation,
especially for frequencies below 10~GHz. Governments, who influence the
regulatory authorities around the world, have resorted to auctioning the use of
spectrum, in a sense to gauge the importance of a particular user. Billions of
USD are being paid for modest bandwidths.
The earth observation, astronomy and similar science driven communities
cannot compete financially with such a pressure system, so this is where
governments have to step in and assess /regulate the situation.
It has been a pleasure to see a situation where the communications and
broadcast communities have come together to formulate sharing of an important
part of the spectrum (roughly, 50 MHz to 800 MHz) in an IEEE standard,
IEEE802.22. This standard (known as the "TV White Space Network" (built on
lower level standards) shows a way that fixed and mobile users can collaborate
in geographically widespread regions, using cognitive radio and geographic
databases of users. This White Space (WS) standard is well described in the
literature and is not the major topic of this short paper.
We wish to extend the idea of the WS concept to include the idea of EM
sensors (such as Radar) adopting this approach to spectrum sharing, providing a
quantum leap in access to spectrum. We postulate that networks of sensors,
using the tools developed by the WS community, can replace and enhance our
present set of EM sensors.
We first define what Networks of Sensors entail (with some history), and then
go on to define, based on a Taxonomy of Symbiosis defined by de
Bary\cite{symb}, how these sensors and other users (especially communications)
can co-exist. This new taxonomy is important for understanding, and should
replace somewhat outdated terminologies from the radar world.