Availability Assessment for Secondary Access in TV White Space

In recent years, the rapid growth in wireless data traffic has posed not only unique opportunities but also great challenges for the wireless industry. In order to meet the growing demand without excessive cost or energy consumption, one feasible option for the operators is to acquire more spectrum for wireless communication. Unlike the lengthy allocation process for exclusive spectrum licenses, secondary spectrum access is deemed as a flexible alternative to obtain additional spectrum at low cost. In particular, the VHF/UHF TV band, so called ’TV White Space’, is considered as the most promising candidate for secondary access thanks to its well defined primary usage and favorable propagation characteristic for building penetration and wide area coverage. Therefore, secondary access in the TV band has been extensively studied by both academic and industry. Most of the research have focused on the detection of ’spectrum holes’ with sensing technologies, while a few others have provided high level analysis of the potential of TV white space with simplistic secondary interference model for single secondary user. Only A limited number of studies have investigated aggregate interference from multiple secondary users, but even these studies have ignored the adjacent channel interference from secondary users close to the TV receivers. Thus, in this thesis we first concentrate on examining the effect of harmful interference on TV reception from short range devices transmitting on adjacent channels, and model the accumulative effect of multi-channel interferences observed in the measurement. Then the basic methodology for evaluating the potential of TV white space is developed in the second part of the thesis, where we propose a new analytical approach for regulating the secondary transmit power that significantly outperforms the existing method in the regulatory framework. Finally, we combine the aggregate interference model and the basic regulation methodology to extend the analysis from single user to multiple user case, first with only users transmitting on different adjacent TV channels and later also including users transmitting on co-channels. Our performance evaluation have shown that the effect of adjacent channel interference at close distance is far from negligible and the accumulative effect of multi-channel interferences has substantial impact on the scalability of a secondary system. In fact, the adjacent channel interference proves to be the primary limiting factor of the TV white space availability for low power short range systems. Nonetheless, because the proposed approach can adapt to varying environmental conditions and consequently utilize the spectrum reuse opportunity more efficiently than existing frameworks, we can still note considerable amount of TV white space available for short range secondary devices.