Spectrum utilization efficiency is one of the primary concerns in the design of future wireless communication systems. Most performance metrics for wireless communication systems focus on either link level capacity or network throughput while ignore the spatial property of wireless transmissions. In this dissertation, we focus on the spatial spectral utilization efficiency of wireless transmissions. We first study the spatial spectral efficiency of single-cell and multi-cell wireless relay systems using area spectral efficiency (ASE) performance metric. We then generalize the performance metric, termed as generalized area spectral efficiency (GASE), to measure the spatial spectral utilization efficiency of arbitrary wireless transmissions. In particular, we first introduce the definition of GASE by illustrating its evaluation for conventional point-to-point transmission. Then we extend the analysis to four different transmission scenarios, namely dual-hop relay transmission, three-node cooperative relay transmission, two-user X channels, and underlay cognitive radio transmission. Finally, we apply the GASE performance metric to investigate the spatial spectral efficiency of wireless network with Poisson distributed nodes and quantify the spatial spectral opportunities that could be explored with secondary cognitive systems. Our research on the spatial spectral utilization efficiency provides a new perspective on the designing of wireless communication systems, especially on the transmission power optimization and space-spectrum resource exploitation. / Graduate / 0544 / leizhang@uvic.ca