An Analysis on Super Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Coexistence in Urban and Rural Areas

Super Wi-Fi is a Wi-Fi-like network built upon TV white spaces (TVWS) exploiting cognitive radio (CR) techniques. Super Wi-Fi is expected to achieve larger coverage than today’s Wi-Fi thanks to its superior propagation characteristics, while suffering from smaller bandwidth compared to Wi-Fi (6–8 MHz versus 20 MHz) which limits its network capacity. Therefore, it has been a common belief that Super Wi-Fi is only suitable for coverage enhancement and not desirable for high data-rate networks. However, there is a lack of studies to confirm such a belief via rigorous comparison of the network capacities of Super Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi. To fill the gap, this thesis performs a thorough study on the downlink capacity of a Super Wi-Fi network coexisting with a Wi-Fi network. Capacity comparison in the scenario with a single Super Wi-Fi AP and a single Wi-Fi AP reveals that Super Wi-Fi can outperform Wi-Fi at the outskirts of the Wi-Fi’s coverage and channel bonding makes Super Wi-Fi more preferable. In addition, capacity comparison in the scenario with a Super Wi-Fi network and a Wi-Fi network each consisting of multiple APs has shown that Super Wi-Fi can effectively mitigate Wi-Fi’s outage in urban areas and can significantly outperform Wi-Fi in rural areas.