Operational spectrum effectiveness: a performance metric for software defined radio

Advanced RF systems such as sofware-defined radio (SDR), given a high degree of agility, in spectrum access, modulation and routing discipline, offer new opportunities to achieve expanding mission requirements while optimizing spectrum utilization. Agile RF systems may be employed within a military environment to intelligently minimize the value-limiting effects of interference if we define "interference" to include all aspects of signal orthogonality. To fully exploit these opportunities, system acquisition principals need measures to evaluate alternative technical approaches and field users need a means to manage the employment of these systems. This paper suggests some directions for the development of measures of operational spectrum effectiveness (OSE) to aid the deployment of advanced wireless technology, including software-defined radio, by the DoD.