A study on the design space for harm claim thresholds

Harm claim threshold policies will offer more flexibility in radio regulations. By defining bounds on the acceptable field strength over time and space, these policies will introduce quantitative measures to inter-system coexistence questions. How-ever, this requires tangible and sufficient means of proving claims of interference through spectrum measurements. In this paper we study drive test requirements in terms of necessary sample set sizes and decorrelated sampling. We present order statistics and extreme value theory as powerful mathematical tools for describing necessary confidence intervals, and test their practical viability with data from an extensive measurement campaign. Furthermore, we discuss by means of example necessary extensions to planning tools for wireless networks operating under an interference threshold policy. Our results emphasize that future regulations will need to be accompanied by a rigorous specification of evidence collection requirements in order to compensate for bias and correlation structure in the spectrum data.