Open and Regionalised Spectrum Repositories for Emerging Countries

TL;DR

This paper explores open, regional spectrum repositories for developing countries, proposing cooperative sensing and governance strategies to utilize TV White Spaces and address spectrum scarcity.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable system for community-driven spectrum data collection and management, including a cooperative sensing mechanism and a governance architecture.

Findings

Extensive measurement campaign identified white spaces in developing regions.

Demonstrated feasibility of low-cost spectrum analysers for data collection.

Developed zebra-rfo, an application for crowd-sourced spectrum data processing.

Abstract

TV White Spaces have recently been proposed as an alternative to alleviate the spectrum crunch, characterised by the need to reallocate frequency bands to accommodate the ever-growing demand for wireless communications. In this paper, we discuss the motivations and challenges for collecting spectrum measurements in developing regions and discuss a scalable system for communities to gather and provide access to White Spaces information through open and regionalised repositories. We further discuss two relevant aspects. First, we propose a cooperative mechanism for sensing spectrum availability using a detector approach. Second, we propose a strategy (and an architecture) on the database side to implement spectrum governance. Other aspects of the work include discussion of an extensive measurement campaign showing a number of white spaces in developing regions, an overview of our experience on low-cost spectrum analysers, and the architecture of zebra-rfo, an application for processing crowd-sourced spectrum data.