TV White Space

The First Step Towards Better Utilization of Frequency Spectrum

Ser Wah Oh, Yugang Ma, Ming-Hung Tao, Edward Peh, Nim K. Cheung

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781119110422
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119110446
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mobile & Wireless Communications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Provides an in-depth coverage of TV White Space Technology (TVWS) and the various challenges of its new innovations

This book covers the full spectrum of TVWS technology including regulations, technology, standardizations, and worldwide deployments. It begins with an introduction to cognitive radio and TVWS. The regulation activities in TVWS throughout North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific are covered in depth. After a discussion of regulations, the authors examine the standardizations developed to specify the enabling technologies of TVWS systems. The following chapter focuses on the key technologies that differentiate TVWS from a conventional wireless communication system.

• Describes various worldwide use cases and deployments based on the needs of the consumers
• Covers IEEE 802.19.1, IEEE 802.22, IEEE 802.11af, IEEE 802.15.4m, and IETF protocol for Accessing White Spaces
• Studies the market and commercial potential of TVWS and other spectrum sharing technologies
• Discusses technological trends in spectrum sharing and additional applications that could leverage on TVWS and other spectrum sharing technologies

TV White Space: The First Step Towards Better Utilization of Frequency Spectrum is written for telecommunications/networks operators, researchers, engineers, government regulators, technical managers, and network equipment manufacturers.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Cognitive Radio and Television White Space

Are wireless communication systems smart?

Wireless communication is a key enabler for smart systems such as smart cities, autonomous ports, and so on. However, are the current wireless communication systems themselves smart? This book looks at some initial aspects of smartness in wireless communication that could pave the way for future smarter wireless communication systems.

In the past decades, the demands for wireless communications grew exponentially. There is no sign of slowing down; instead, the growth seemed to be accelerating. Besides traditional television and audio broadcasting, today wireless communications are used everywhere from public cellular phone systems to enterprise wireless networks, as well as specialized systems in railway, maritime, and aviation transports, medical electronics, remote sensing, emergency services, security surveillance, military, radio astronomy, satellite, and so on.

Due to the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), wireless applications are rapidly expanding into machine-to-machine (M2M) connections. All these applications make extensive use of the frequency spectrum. Many of such applications are bandwidth hungry. To cater for the growth of various new services, many countries all over the world have crafted their national broadband plans to address future communication needs with the aim to stimulate economic growth by providing better information infrastructure. Among the broadband alternatives, wireless is one of the most important items in these plans.

Unfortunately, spectrum is a scarce resource. While technologies are improving to squeeze more data into each frequency channel, policy makers still face stiff challenges in addressing the needs of everybody since the demand (in bandwidth) outpaced that of supply. For services that require dedicated channels, for example, cellular, it becomes harder and harder for regulators to clear up a chunk of frequency bands for these services. For example, the regulators worldwide find it hard to fully harmonize the spectrum for the fourth generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks since different countries have different fragments of spectrum left for such assignment. This issue is becoming more and more prominent as can be seen in the proposals toward the fifth generation (5G) networks where there is simply no common frequency spectrum available.

On the other hand, regulators also assigned some frequency spectrum as unlicensed bands such as the industrial, scientific, and medical radio bands (ISM). In these unlicensed bands, different wireless systems share the same spectrum resource and coexist by adopting politeness protocols. Wireless systems that use unlicensed bands, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and so on, are becoming more and more attractive since they have better spectrum utilization rate and there is no charge in spectrum usage.

One might ask why not the regulators assign all spectrums to be unlicensed? This book attempts to shed some light on the various considerations for spectrum usage.

In this chapter, we look at the various aspects of the spectrum, including their utilizations (Section 1.1), the future needs (Section 1.3), and why do we need more agile and dynamic spectrum access technologies (Sections 1.4 and 1.5).

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Taxonomy

In this book, readers will see terms such as spectrum, frequency, band, channel, bandwidth, data rates, and so on appearing quite frequently. In some instances, they may be used interchangeably. In other cases, they refer to slightly different phenomena. In order to help the readers understand the differences, we use another natural resource, that is, land, as analogy.

Spectrum	Land
Frequency	Different types of lands, hilly, flat, forest, wetland, and so on
Band	Division of land for different usage, for example, parks, housing, roads, and so on
Channel	Marking of land so that rules could be followed more easily, for example, lane markings on roads
Bandwidth	Using the road as an example, this will be how wide the lane is being marked, for example, lanes for cars on highway are much wider than lanes for motorcycles
Data rates	If you view different vehicles as data packets, this is how fast the vehicles can flow through the road

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1.1 Spectrum Survey

Let us take a look at the current spectrum utilization. Figure 1.1 shows the frequency allocations from 30 MHz to 300 GHz in the United States. It can be seen that the spectrum in this frequency range has been fully assigned.

Figure 1.1 A typical frequency allocation from 30 MHz to 300 GHz. (The chart was produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Office of Spectrum Management, January 2016.) (From Ref. [1]. Public domain.)

On the other hand, if we take a look at the spectrum utilization of the assigned frequencies in Table 1.1, which is the spectrum occupancy measurement at Green Band, West Virginia, we will be surprised that the utilization rate of the assigned frequencies is so low, and the average spectrum use is just 1% from 30 MHz to 2.7 GHz. There is a similar measurement report shown in Figure 1.2, where we can see that the spectrum efficiency is about 6.5% from 30 MHz to 7 GHz in Singapore. This implies that there are plenty of rooms for improvement. Spectrum is a natural and finite resource that all wireless communications rely on. Only if we continuously increase the spectrum utilization can the growth of wireless communications be sustainable.

Table 1.1 Summary of Spectrum Occupancy in Green Bank, West Virginia [2]

Start Frequency (MHz)	Bandwidth (MHz)	Spectrum Band Allocation	NRAO Spectrum Fraction Used	NRAO Occupied Spectrum (MHz)	Average % Occupied
30	24	PLM, Amateur, others	0.00045	0.01	0.0
54	34	TV 2–6, RC	0.11056	3.76	11.1
108	30	Air Traffic Control, Aero Nav	0.15485	4.65	15.5
138	36	Fixed Mobile, Amateur, others	0.02745	0.99	2.7
174	42	TV 7–13	0.00220	0.09	0.2
216	9	Maritime Mobile, Amateur, others	0.00556	0.05	0.6
225	181	Fixed Mobile, Aero, others	0.01842	3.33	1.8
406	64	Amateur, Radio Geolocation, Fixed, Mobile, Radiolocation	0.00379	0.24	0.4
470	42	TV 14–20	0.00379	0.16	0.4
512	96	TV 21–36	0.04283	4.11	4.3
608	90	TV 37–51	0.00156	0.14	0.2
698	108	TV 52–69	0.00113	0.12	0.1
806	96	Cell phone and SMR	0.00017	0.02	0.0
902	26	Unlicensed	0.00004	0.00	0.0
928	32	Paging, SMS, Fixed, BX Aux, and FMS	0.02459	0.79	2.5
960	280	IFF, TACAN, Global Positioning System (GPS), others	0.00000	0.00	0.0
1240	60	Amateur	0.00012	0.01	0.0
1300	100	Aero Radar, military	0.00000	0.00	0.0
1400	125	Space/Satellite, Fixed Mobile, Telemetry	0.00000	0.00	0.0
1525	185	Mobile Satellite, GPS L1, Mobile Satellite, Meteorological	0.00082	0.15	0.1
1710	140	Fixed, Fixed Mobile	0.00000	0.00	0.0
1850	140	PCS, Asyn, Iso	0.00001	0.00	0.0
1990	120	TV Aux	0.00009	0.01	0.0
2110	90	Common Carriers, Private Companies, MDS	0.00353	0.32	0.4
2200	100	Space Opera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Cognitive Radio and Television White Space
• Chapter 2: Regulations
• Chapter 3: Standardizations
• Chapter 4: TVWS Technology
• Chapter 5: Worldwide Deployment
• Chapter 6: Commercial and Market Potential
• Chapter 7: Future Development
• Appendix A: Dynamic Spectrum Alliance Model White Spaces Rules
• Appendix B: Performance of SEA
• Appendix C: Self-Positioning Based on DVB-T2 Signals
• Appendix D: Algorithm for Dynamic Spectrum Assignment
• Appendix E: Calculation for Area-Based WSDB
• Appendix F: Embedded Broadcast WSDB
• Appendix G: Revenue Maximization of WSDB-Q
• Index
• The Comsoc Guides to Communications Technologies
• End User License Agreement