Postdoc Federico Bobbio Wins Best Paper Award at IEEE DySPAN 2025

Bobbio led a research team in developing a novel radio spectrum allocation mechanism that incentivizes truthful interference reporting and ensures more efficient spectrum utilization

Northwestern Engineering’s Federico Bobbio earned the Best Paper Award in the policy track at the 2025 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Symposium on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN), held May 12 – 16 in London.

Federico Bobbio
Federico Bobbio
Bobbio is a postdoctoral scholar in electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Communications and Networking (Commnet) Laboratory. His research focuses on algorithmic policymaking and regulations, game theory, matching theory, mathematical optimization, and computational complexity.

The DySPAN symposium showcases pioneering advancements and collaboration in radio frequency spectrum technology and policy innovation, including spectrum sensing, access, sharing, and utilization across emerging wireless technologies.

The winning paper, titled “Costly Measurements to incentivize Spectrum Sharing,” is coauthored by Bobbio’s advisers, Randall Berry, John A. Dever Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Michael Honig, AT&T Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. Collaborators also included Thanh Nguyen (Purdue University), Vijay Subramanian (University of Michigan), and Rakesh Vohra (University of Pennsylvania).

Randy Berry (left) and Michael Honig (middle) receive the Best Paper Award at DySPAN 2025 on behalf of the research team.
Randy Berry (left) and Michael Honig (middle) receive the Best Paper Award at DySPAN 2025 on behalf of the research team.

“I feel honored. I am deeply thankful to my postdoc advisers — working with them has been an inspiring journey of creativity and discovery,” Bobbio said. “Receiving this award inspires me to push the boundaries of spectrum market design even further.”

In this work, Bobbio and the research team developed a novel radio spectrum allocation mechanism that ensures more efficient spectrum utilization by incentivizing truthful interference reporting by incumbents — such as federal and scientific users — who have been allocated exclusive access to prime spectrum bands.

As modern connectivity services, from cellular broadband to emerging satellite communications, place increasing demands on the radio spectrum, regulators are attempting to balance expanded commercial access with the potential impacts to incumbents.

“The danger is that, without reliable data on how much degradation the incumbent service provider would experience due to sharing with another provider, regulators may make allocation decisions that do not make the best use of existing spectrum resources,” Bobbio said. “Indeed, long-time holders of spectrum have an incentive to report an inflated estimate of the expected degradation to keep others out, and newcomers that wish to access those bands, such as broadband access providers, might overstate their expected contributions to social welfare.”

The team’s model presents straightforward rewards and penalties when competing agents with different valuation metrics seek access to spectrum. By incorporating costly, probabilistic interference claim inspections with adjustable precision, the framework discourages misrepresentation by establishing a clear incentive for all parties to report both the true interference and associated service degradation they are subject to, and the value they place on rights to access a particular spectrum band.

“From that ‘honest information,’ we derive a clear, easy-to-follow policy for regulators like the Federal Communications Commission to make well-informed decisions that facilitate economically efficient sharing of spectrum resources,” Bobbio said. “The surprising part? The best policy turns out to be completely deterministic: there is no random guessing involved.”

Bobbio noted that the team’s approach can be applied more broadly to any shared-resource market where different users rely on distinct measures.

“At the same time, it directs engineers toward the precise measurement protocols needed to support these incentives, driving the development of finer, more reliable sensing tools,” Bobbio said. “By uniting economic strategy with technical realities, we are indicating a direction to transform spectrum sharing from a theoretical concept into a practical, ready-to-deploy solution for efficient, transparent resource allocation.”

As a next step, Bobbio and the team are investigating several research questions, including:

  • How does the system behave when dozens or hundreds of new users want to gain access to the spectrum?
  • How does the system change when spectrum is shared across multiple time periods?
  • How can this work inform the modeling of a decentralized sharing setting among different competing agents?

Bobbio earned a PhD in computer science and operations research from the Université de Montréal and a master’s degree in theoretical mathematics from the University of Pisa.

 

McCormick News Article