Airwave Swaps: An Automated System for Identifying Win-Win and Win-No-Loss Spectrum Swaps

Published on April 14, 2025

Airwave Research is excited to announce a novel tool for identifying win-win and win-no-loss channel swaps between spectrum owners. This tool has significant potential to simplify network overhead, increase capacity, and improve wireless services across the industry by maximizing channel adjacencies and thereby reducing the need for carrier aggregation.

Motivation

Despite industry advancements in carrier aggregation, having large continuous channel blocks is preferable for spectrum owners.

The Airwave Research platform enables channel block visualizations in any market. Looking at assignments across the country, it is possible to notice suboptimal layouts when they occur. Here is an example in one market:

In the image above, the AW-D block can be swapped with the AT-I block to improve continuity for both parties. As discussed below, this is an instance of a win-win spectrum swap.

The motivation for this paper was to create a system that could identify opportunities for swapping in an automated fashion.

Defining Win-Win and Win-No-Loss Scenarios

Spectrum swaps occur when two entities mutually agree to exchange spectrum assets. While swaps can occur across frequency bands and geographic markets, our tool specifically targets swaps within the same geographic market and the same band. We chose to remove inter-market or inter-band swaps from consideration given the highly subjective nature of market and band spectrum valuations.

Licenses can be allocated on a variety of markets by the FCC, the majority of which are defined by a set of counties. Moreover, many licenses are partitioned to a subset of counties that make up the full market. For these reasons, swap opportunities were considered at the county level to ensure consistency between the two assets.

Additionally, our analysis is restricted to swaps occurring within the same duplex mode (e.g., swaps between SDL and FDD spectrum are not considered), preserving technical compatibility. Leased channel blocks were also omitted given the uncertainty around swap rights.

Evaluating Swap Benefits

Our framework evaluates the impact of proposed swaps using two metrics:

• Maximum Continuous Span: The largest uninterrupted frequency span held within a single band.
• Minimum Continuous Span: The smallest uninterrupted frequency span held within a single band.

A swap qualifies as "win-win" if both participating parties experience measurable improvements in the maximum span, without a reduction in the minimum span. A "win-no-loss" scenario is identified when at least one party experiences improved continuity without negatively impacting the other party, measured by both of the metrics.

Illustrative Examples

Win-win Swap

Potential swap: AW-D for AT-I

Win-no-loss Swap

Potential swap: WT-B for WT-E or WT-A for WT-D

Underlying Data

The underlying data for this system is from the Airwave Research platform, which is a leading platform for researching the spectrum landscape across the U.S. and its territories. For this paper, exported data was used to produce the analysis.

The web platform’s advanced visual tooling allowed us to identify possible swaps through visual inspection prior to building the automated system. We found examples across different bands and markets to guide our testing and ensure that we identified valid opportunities and discarded invalid opportunities.

Methodology

Our methodology systematically groups spectrum blocks based on technical compatibility—specifically identical band classes, link types, duplex modes, and bandwidth. This ensures fairness, technical feasibility, and meaningful comparisons.

We then evaluate each possible pairing of spectrum blocks belonging to different owners. We eliminate technically infeasible swaps, such as those involving identical owners, identical radio channel blocks, or incompatible link types.

To quantify potential benefits, we compare each spectrum owner's holdings before and after a hypothetical swap using our defined metrics. By assessing these scenarios, we are able to bucket each swap into its associated category.

Results and Recommendations

The result of this comprehensive analysis is a streamlined, actionable set of recommended spectrum swaps. Broken down by a county-level market, we found a total of 4,725 potential swaps. This is broken down as follows:

• 538 win-win
• 4,187 win-no-loss

The output specifies which asset should be exchanged by each party denoted by a specific channel block and call sign. For win-no-loss situations, we identify who the beneficiary is in the transaction.

Interestingly, 83% of the recommendations were in the n66 band. The n66 band includes AWS 1, 3 & 4 Upper. This is noteworthy in light of the upcoming auction, where adjacencies will be a major motivating factor.

Accessing the System

If you are a spectrum owner interested in leveraging this system, please reach out through our website at https://www.airwaveresearch.com/get-access.