Open and regionalised spectrum repositories for emerging countries

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 article, we discuss the motivations and challenges for collecting spectrum measurements in developing regions and discuss a scalable system for the crowds to gather and provide access to White Spaces information through open and regionalised repositories. We further discuss two relevant aspects. Firstly, we propose a cooperative mechanism for sensing spectrum availability using a detector approach. Secondly, 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.