TVWS policies to enable efficient spectrum sharing

The transition from analogue to the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTV) in Europe is planned to be completed by the end of the year 2012. The DTV spectrum allocation is such that there are a number of TV channels which cannot be used for additional high power broadcast transmitters due to mutual interference and hence are left unused within a given geographical location, i.e. the TV channels are geographically interleaved. The use of geographically interleaved spectrum provides for the so-called TV white spaces (TVWS) an opportunity for deploying new wireless services. The main objective of this paper is to present the spectrum policies that are suitable for TVWS at European level, identified within the COGEU project. The COGEU project aims the efficient exploitation of the geographical interleaved spectrum (TVWS). COGEU is an ICT collaborative project supported by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme. Nine partners from seven EU countries representing academia, research institutes and industry are involved in the project. The COGEU project is a composite of technical, business, and regulatory/policy domains, with the objective of taking advantage of the TV digital switchover by developing cognitive radio systems that leverage the favorable propagation characteristics of the UHF broadcast spectrum through the introduction and promotion of real-time secondary spectrum trading and the creation of new spectrum commons regimes. COGEU will also define new methodologies for compliance testing and certification of TVWS equipment to ensure non-interference coexistence with the DVB-T European standard. The innovation brought by COGEU is the combination of cognitive access to TV white spaces with secondary spectrum trading mechanisms.telecommunications,spectrum management,secondary spectrum market,regulation,TV white spaces,cognitive radio

ETSI RRS - The Standardization Path to Next Generation Cognitive Radio Systems

This paper details the current work status of the ETSI Reconfigurable Radio Systems (RRS) Technical Committee (TC) and gives an outlook on the future evolution. While previous publications have presented an overview of ETSI RRS' main working axes related to i) Cognitive Radio System Aspects, ii) Radio Equipment Architecture (including a Cognitive Pilot Channel (CPC) proposal and a Functional Architecture (FA) for Management and Control of Reconfigurable Radio Systems), iii) Cognitive Management and Control and iv) Public Safety, this document focuses on latest progress related to UHF White Spaces work and the definition of an SDR Handset Architecture. In particular, it is outlined how Cognitive Radio principles can help to adapt existing and/or evolving Radio Standards, such as 3GPP Long Term Evolution, to a possible operation in UHF White Space bands

Malawi's TV white space regulations : a review and comparison with FCC and Ofcom regulations

Regulators are in the process of framing regulations to allow secondary use of vacant TV channels while protecting TV broadcast services from harmful interference. While the US and UK regulators have already passed such regulations in 2008 and 2015 respectively, other countries are still in drafting stages and the underlying circumstances in these countries could be different from those of the US and UK. Malawi released its final draft regulations in 2016. While the US and UK legislate for dynamic spectrum access and licence-exemption for secondary users, Malawi’s draft regulations require such users to apply for a licence for assigned TV white space spectrum. This paper provides an analytical review of Malawi’s regulations and a comparison with FCC and Ofcom regulations, which new regulations can build on. This analysis will also inform future work on network management tools that can enable practical deployment and coexistence of large-scale TV white space networks in a dynamic spectrum access environment in Africa

A comparative investigation on performance and which is the preferred methodology for spectrum management; geo-location spectrum database or spetrum sensing

A Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Witwatersrand, in the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering Johannesburg, 2015.Due to the enormous demand for multimedia services which relies hugely on the availability of spectrum, service providers and technologist are devising a means or method which is able to fully satisfy these growing demands. The availability of spectrum to meet these demands has been a lingering issue for the past couple of years. Many would have it tagged as spectrum scarcity but really the main problem is not how scarce the spectrum is but how efficiently allocated to use is the spectrum. Once such inefficiency is tackled effectively, then we are a step closer in meeting the enormous demands for uninterrupted services. However, to do so, there are techniques or methodologies being developed to aid in the efficient management of spectrum. In this research project, two methodologies were considered and the efficiency of these methodologies in the areas of spectrum management. The Geo-location Spectrum Database (GLSD) which is the most adopted technique and the Cognitive radio spectrum sensing technique are currently the available techniques in place. The TV whitespaces (TVWS) was explored using both techniques and certain comparison based on performances; implementation, practicability, cost and flexibility were used as an evaluation parameter in arriving at a conclusion. After accessing both methodologies, conclusions were deduced on the preferred methodology and how its use would efficiently solve the issues encountered in spectrum managemen

Spectrum Sharing Etiquette Considering Primary User Activity Pattern in Dynamic TVWS via Cournot Game Theory

Television White Space (TVWS) networks only utilizes a licensed channel in the absence of a primary user network (PUN). Therefore, the performance of TVWS networks are greatly depended on activity pattern of PUN. In this paper, we address the problem of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio environment consisting of PUN and TVWS networks from the perspective of spectrum quality. We propose a self‐indicating distributive dynamic Cournot spectrum economic game using non‐cooperative game. To capture the dynamic parameter that characterizes dynamic TVWS, a differentiating parameter known as the Channel Instability Index (CII), β, was introduced to grade the leased PUN channel holding time (with consideration of the time‐varying radio attributes of the dynamic TVWS environment) and to enforce truthfulness in spectrum transactions. Based on the CII model, two possible scenarios were considered. Case I occurs if β = 0, which signifies stable PUN bandwidth and Case II, occurs if 0.1 ≤ β ≤ 0.9, which denotes an unstable PUN bandwidth spectrum. Based on our model, it was showed that utility and QoS measured in‐terms of probability of dropped packets of TVWS networks were increased by more than 15 % in any epoch with the key enabler as β