What do PMP and Airbnb have in common?
At first it doesn’t seem like modern transmission technology and accommodation booking would have many similarities!
In the abstract, however, they do share one key characteristic: the ability to dynamically reallocate resources according to demand.
In a PMP system the resources are units of time (of the order of microseconds) on a radio frequency carrier; in Airbnb the resources are units of time (in days this time) of occupancy of a room or apartment.
Why do we want to allocate resources dynamically in these two cases?
The answer is that we wish to increase the utilisation of the underlying asset: the RF carrier in the PMP case, and the room or apartment in the Airbnb case.
In a PMP system, if one link in a sector is instantaneously using less capacity than its “fair share”, then the system can reallocate those resources to another link that may have excess demand at that instant.
Likewise, if I am on holiday for two weeks, and so not using my apartment, then I may choose to rent it out while I am away.
In both cases, a resource that would have been idle - carrying no traffic, or sitting empty - is now utilised beneficially.
More importantly, this is not just a theoretical plus, but also translates into a financial benefit.
In the Airbnb case, the owner of the asset has extra income to pay for the purchase and maintenance of the asset.
In the PMP case, overall spectrum requirements to carry a given volume of data across numerous links are reduced, and so is the financial cost of renting that spectrum from the regulator (we cover this reduction in much more detail here).
It’s this financial benefit that is driving the adoption of PMP, and also the uptake of platforms like Airbnb.
The same underlying characteristic is common to a number of other platforms and technologies; for instance Uber (like Airbnb dealing with physical resources), cloud computing and server virtualisation (like us dealing with intangible resources).
Incidentally, here at CBNL we often use Airbnb to meet our business travel needs, and we’ve stayed in some great and colourful places as a result!