Universal Scanning GUI Tool for Available and Usable TV White Space (TVWS) Spectrum

TL;DR

This paper presents a versatile GUI tool for evaluating TV white space spectrum availability and usability across any geographic location, integrating terrain models, regulatory parameters, and RF optimization techniques.

Contribution

The work introduces a generalized, flexible GUI tool that enables comprehensive spectrum analysis and RF planning for TVWS, adaptable to any region and frequency band.

Findings

The tool accurately identifies available TVWS channels in various geographic areas.

It effectively visualizes spectrum data and noise levels interactively.

RF optimization improves antenna orientation for better communication quality.

Abstract

In this era of advanced communication technologies, many remote rural and hard-to-reach areas still lack Internet access due to technological, geographical, and economic challenges. The TV white space (TVWS) technology has proven to be effective and feasible in connecting these areas to Internet service in many parts of the world. The TVWS-based systems operate based on geolocation white space databases (WSDB) to protect the primary systems from harmful interference. Thus, there is a critical need to identify the available and usable channels that can be utilized by secondary white space devices (WSDs) in a specific geographic area. In this work, we developed a generalized and flexible graphical user interface (GUI) tool to evaluate the availability and usability of the TVWS channels and their noise levels at each geographic location within the analyzed area. The developed tool has many features and capabilities, such as allowing users to scan the TVWS spectrum for any geographic area in the world and any frequency band in the TVWS spectrum. Moreover, it allows the user to apply widely used terrain-based radio propagation models. It provides the flexibility to import the elevation terrain profile of any region with the desired spatial accuracy and resolution. In addition, various system parameters, including those related to regulation rules, can be modified in the tool. This tool exports to an external dataset file the output data of the available and usable TVWS channels and their noise levels, and it also visualizes these data interactively. Moreover, we develop an RF planning and optimization algorithm in this tool to evaluate the various communication metrics between the TVWS BS and the user equipment (UEs). This tool also provides an RF optimization technique using Ray Tracing to find the best azimuth and elevation orientation for both the BS and the UE antennas.