Software tool for assessing secondary system opportunities in spectrum whitespaces

Abstract

The prospect of increasing wireless capacity via secondary access to spatio-temporally underutilized chunks of spectrum, so-called whitespaces, has been proposed as a central aspect of emerging radio systems in response to the imminent spectrum scarcity problem. In this demonstration we present a novel software tool that helps researchers, industry, and regulators in assessing the feasibility and value of secondary spectrum access beyond simple whitespace availability calculation. Whereas existing software applications merely provide visualization of estimated secondary spectrum over a geographic area, our tool uniquely enables a holistic evaluation of the realistic potential of whitespace technologies, by modelling the performance of entire secondary systems in the envisioned eco-system of dynamic spectrum access policy and technology. Our tool provides a unified and flexible software framework and assessment methodology to conduct such studies, and is composed of an extensive primary spectrum usage database, a graphical interface for user interaction, and an interface to an extensible MATLAB backend for numerical calculations. We showcase the deployment scenarios of cellular and Wi-Fi-like secondary networks in TVWS (TV whitespaces). We also compare the impact of employing FCC-type of regulatory rules (with a fixed power/no-talk distance configuration) against European WG-SE43 regulatory proposals (with probabilistic access and power control). The case studies we will demonstrate are based on real network configuration data of European and US TV networks.