Spectrum sharing between WiFi and radio astronomy

Abstract

The proliferation of wireless local area network also known as WiFi system has enabled easy wireless information access for consumers. However, it also causes radio frequency interference (RFI) to passive wireless systems such as radio astronomy systems (RAS), making almost impossible to get useful scientific observations around the WiFi bands. This paper proposes a new paradigm for the coexistence between WiFi and RAS. The proposed approach creates a coexistence access zone (CAZ) around the RAS site within which WiFi and RAS follow a pre-determined time-division spectrum access. Two modified WiFi medium access control (MAC) protocols are developed to embed the time-division coexistence access. Furthermore, traffic statistics based improved spectrum access is developed. Performance evaluation results show that at the cost of slight WiFi throughput reduction, RAS achieves substantial RFI-free spectrum access which were infeasible in the existing paradigm.