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

From Sensing to Predictions and Database Technique: A Review of TV White Space Information Acquisition in Cognitive Radio Networks

Strategies to acquire white space information is the single most significant functionality in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) and as such, it has gone some evolution to enhance information accuracy. The evolution trends are spectrum sensing, prediction algorithm and recently, geo-location database technique. Previously, spectrum sensing was the main technique for detecting the presence/absence of a primary user (PU) signal in a given radio frequency (RF) spectrum. However, this expectation could not materialized as a result of numerous technical challenges ranging from hardware imperfections to RF signal impairments. To convey the evolutionary trends in the development of white space information, we present a survey of the contemporary advancements in PU detection with emphasis on the practical deployment of CRNs i.e. Television white space (TVWS) networks. It is found that geo-location database is the most reliable technique to acquire TVWS information although, it is financially driven. Finally, using financially driven database model, this study compared the data-rate and spectral efficiency of FCC and Ofcom TV channelization. It was discovered that Ofcom TV channelization outperforms FCC TV channelization as a result of having higher spectrum bandwidth. We proposed the adoption of an all-inclusive TVWS information acquisition model as the future research direction for TVWS information acquisition techniques