Wireless options for high data-rate indoor users:

cognitive access to TV white space

S. Kawade, M. Nekovee
Mobility Research Department, BT Innovation & Design,
Adastral Park, Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, UK IP5 3RE
santosh.2.kawade@bt.com
maziar.nekovee@bt.com

Abstract— There is a growing demand for high data-rate
mobile and indoor services at a reasonable cost, and using an
indoor wireless system at end of the ADSL+ or fibre line is
one potential way of meeting this demand. Industry players
such as fixed-line and cellular operators have adopted similar
approaches but based around different wireless technologies such
as WiFi or HSPA femtocells and potentially LTE/WiMAX in
the future. However due to issues related to interference in
the license-exempt band and limited spectrum availability in
the licensed band there are some doubts as to whether or
not the available wireless options will be able to effectively
distribute the high bandwidths within a home environment. With
use of cognitive radio technology, the digital TV switchover
program, offers a potential opportunity to address this issue.
The aim of this paper is to assess the feasibility of using
the TV White Space(TVWS) spectrum for home networking
services and compare the performance with that of other license-
exempt spectral bands, namely 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz band. It
studies the limitations in presence of interference and identifies
the operating conditions when the system performance would
start to become unacceptable. Using analytical and simulation
techniques, it is shown that the performance of TVWS spectral
outperforms the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz for low to medium traffic
loadings (around 2 Mb/s per home) at significantly lower energy
requirements. However, to achieve these gains (a) the use of
spectrum aggregation techniques and (b) operation at low power
levels, i.e, below 3 dBm per channel becomes essential. The work
also shows that for heavy traffic loadings (6 Mb/s and above
per home) in dense deployment densities, TVWS band should be
used as complementary interface for congestion relief instead.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Currently there is rapid growth in traffic demand due to the
rising popularity of video streaming and on-demand services.
This has resulted in severe bottlenecks in the network and has
thus expedited the need for a faster broadband. Consequently
network operators such as BT and Virgin in the United
Kingdom (UK) are rolling out a next generation network with
fibre and ADSL+ technology which promises speeds up to
40 Mb/s and 24 Mb/s respectively. It is estimated that this
figure will translate to providing at least 2 Mb/s data-rate for
90% of time during the three hour busy period. The roll-out
time-lines also corresponds with Digital Britain’s [1] universal
broadband commitment that will enable all homes in UK to
receive at least 2 Mb/s by 2012.
Mobile broadband too is experiencing a significant growth
in take-up and appears to be aimed at providing higher data-
rate services with an emphasis on users indoors. However, cel-
lular network operating costs are currently such that it may not
be economically viable for cellular operators to use traditional
macro network designs to provide same level of coverage for
high data-rate services for indoor users as typically provided
for voice. This is mainly because of the increase in number
of base stations that would be required due to the range
reduction associated with increasing data-rates and operation
at higher 3G frequencies. Significant investments would have
to be made for both acquiring new sites and providing the
additional higher capacity backhaul. One potential means of
addressing this problem currently considered by the wireless
community is to effectively install a low cost wireless base
station in the customers home and to use their fibre or ADSL+
connectivity to provide the backhaul needed.
So in presence of a high data-rate line per home, an obvious
question is to ask what wireless solution would be most
effective to distribute the high bandwidths within the home
environment. Current home base station solution provided by a
fixed line operator, would be a WiFi device operating in the 2.4
GHz license-exempt spectrum. Whereas the home base station
solution provided by the cellular operator would essentially
be an HSPA/HSPA+ device called as Femtocell operating in
the their portion of the 2 GHz licensed spectrum, which in
future could be LTE or WiMAX devices with the later being
operated in the new 2.5 GHz licensed band. We leave the work
of evaluating the femtocell solution as a follow-on work and
focus on the license-exempt band in this paper.
The traditional WiFi solution uses 802.11g technology
(more recently 802.11n) in the 2.4 GHz license-exempt spec-
trum and comprises of only three non-overlapping channels, 20
MHz each. Since the 2.4 GHz band is also used by a number
of other applications such as TV streamers, microwave-ovens,
baby alarms, etc performance in this band suffers due to
interference and congestion issues especially at high device
densities as studied in [2]. Further as 802.11g and 802.11n
based systems use OFDM technology they are more vulnerable
to interference effects as compared to a spread spectrum
technology as studied in [3], [4]. Due to interference issues in
the 2.4 GHz band there are concerns as to whether or not the
high data-rate indoor requirement will be satisfactorily met.
One proposal made in this paper is to consider migration
to the 5 GHz license-exempt band. The 5 GHz band has 8

978-1-4577-0183-2/09/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE


non-overlapping channels in band-A and 11 non-overlapping
channels in band-B. In this paper we refer to the band-A and
band-B collectively as 5 GHz band. However the digital TV
switchover program also offers a potential opportunity as large
portions of VHF/UHF TV bands called as TV white space
(TVWS) or interleaved spectrum becomes available between
the year 2009 to 2012. Digital TV switchover is the process
of turning off the analog TV signal and replacing it with a
digital signal. UK telecoms regulator, OFCOM is committed
to stimulate development of new mobile and wireless services
and will be releasing around 256 MHz of TVWS spectrum
from 470 MHz to 862 MHz band [6]. The TVWS spectrum
is potentially suitable for a wide range of services includ-
ing super-fast wireless broadband services, mobile television,
point-to-point wireless backhaul to name a few. This work
studies the feasibility of using TVWS spectrum for home
networking services as being studied by standard bodies like
the ECMA-CogNeA alliance [5].
It follows from this that the various home base station
solutions could potentially be based upon several different
combinations of technology and spectral bands. Therefore, the
aim of this paper is to compare and contrast these combina-
tions to assess whether the performance differences between
them are significant enough for any of them to potentially have
significant operational advantage over the others. This will
be approached by structuring the paper as follows, section II
provides results of TVWS spectrum availability using database
approach, section III provides analytic results of a performance
comparison study for the various approaches and derives
baseline performance, i.e., without interference; section IV
studies the impact of interference and identifies the system
break-points; section V discusses the study results in details
and finally section VI gives the overall conclusion.
II. TVWS SPECTRUM AVAILABILITY RESULTS
The availability of TV white spaces varies strongly with lo-
cation, hence use of cognitive radio (CR) technology becomes
essential. Cognitive radio technology is a new technology
involving either spectrum sensing technique or a geolocation
database to detect vacant frequencies and opportunistically use
them without causing harmful interference to primary users
of the spectrum, TV receivers in this case. Availability of
TVWS channels for the scenario studied was derived using the
database approach. In a database approach a centrally managed
database containing the information of available TV channels
is made available to secondary users of the spectrum. The
home base station and the associated clients are configured
in a master-slave configuration. Since the home base station
is connected at end of the fixed line at a specific postcode
address its geolocation information is known. Based on its
geolocation data and specific service requirements, the home
base station queries the central database for channel availabil-
ity. The database returns information about various operating
parameters such as number of channels, centre frequencies and
associated power levels available for use in that location.
50
40
percentage of postcodes
30
20
10
0
0 5 10 15 20
number of channels used
Fig. 1. UK Digital TVWS map showing number of TV channels used as a
function of population-weighted post-code data
Using accurate digital TV coverage maps together with
a database of digital TV transmitters, we have developed a
methodology for identifying available TVWS channels and
associated power levels for any given location in the UK. Fig.
1 provides the results about the number of TVWS channels
used as a function of population-weighted postcode data. A
postcode is a means to identify postal delivery areas and
there are approximately 1.78 million postcodes in the UK
which covers every address. The plot shows that approximately
200 MHz of spectrum would be typically available for 75%
of postcodes, while about 150 MHz of spectrum would be
available on an average basis for the whole population as
confirmed by earlier work done in [7].
III. P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON : DATA - RATE VERSUS
RANGE STUDY
This section provides results of a performance compari-
son study of expected data-rate versus range for the three
approaches being considered, namely 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and
TVWS spectral band. Best case results without any interfer-
ence effects are derived to set an upper bound for the chosen
operating conditions.
A. Assumptions
Table I lists the general assumptions made for the various
wireless options while other specific assumptions are listed
below.
• Uplink performance not considered due to complexity of
simulating client collision avoidance dynamics
• WiFi-OFDM technology assumed for TVWS spectral
band
• Propagation models: IEEE TGn channel models [8], ITU-
R P.1238-5 [9]
 TABLE I
T ECHNICAL CHOICES FOR COMPARING THE VARIOUS SPECTRAL BANDS

Parameters WiFi@2.4 GHz WiFi@5 GHz TVWS

band
Radio 2.4-2.483 GHz 5.15-5.35 GHz 470-862 MHz
Frequency 5.47-5.725 GHz
EIRP 20 dBm 23, 30 dBm 3, 9 dBm
Channel 20 MHz 20 MHz 8, 24 MHz
bandwidth (40 MHz with spectrum
optional) aggregation
Available 83.5 MHz 380 MHz 150 MHz
spectrum (average)
Wireless OFDM
Interface
Modulation- 1/2,3/4 BPSK
Coding 1/2,3/4 QPSK Fig. 2. Data-rate versus range comparison in various spectral bands

schemes 1/2 16QAM

2/3,3/4 64QAM
• 2x1 transmit diversity antenna scheme for 2.4 and 5 GHz,
no antenna scheme for TVWS band due to λ/2 restriction
• Pathloss exponent: 3.3
• Antenna radiation pattern assumed isotropic
• Outside-wall loss: 10 dB for 5 GHz, 8 dB for 2.4 GHz,
4 dB for TVWS band
• Indoor-wall loss: 4 dB for 5 GHz, 3 dB for 2.4 GHz, 1
dB for TVWS band
• A 20 dB margin assumed for fading, body, cable losses.
• MAC layer overheads were assumed to be approximately
30% of the raw wireless link rate
• Number of clients per home base station: 1
• Maximum distance of client from home base station: 12
metres, value chosen such that it gives a coverage area
that almost all residential property boundaries fall within.
To place the results within the context of a high data-rate,
indoor service, we specify two service requirements of being
able to achieve a minimum of 2 Mb/s and 6 Mb/s at client
location within 12 metres of the home base station. These two
criterion are used for comparison of the various options in rest
of the paper.
order as seen in Table I, then at short distances from the
home base station any difference in data-rate between them
simply reflects the use of different bandwidth RF channels.
Therefore, it is expected that WiFi with 20 MHz channel
size having peak data-rate of around 50 Mb/s would be better
than TVWS spectrum of 8 MHz size with peak data rate of
just below 20 Mb/s, as confirmed by the results the figure.
However, it will also be observed that WiFi at 5 GHz has the
greatest decrease in data-rate with range while TVWS band
the least and the 2.4 GHz in between as expected because
they are operating in different spectral bands. This explains
why the highest data-rate is provided by 5 GHz for ranges
below 10m and why TVWS band performance at 20 metres
starts to become comparable to that of others. However due to
the improved propagation characteristics of lower frequencies,
TVWS spectral band can meet the set requirement at a low
energy levels, that is 11 dBm below as compared to 2.4 GHz
band and on an average about 18 dBm below as compared to
5 GHz band.

B. Analytic results
Using the information given in Table I and assumptions of
earlier section, the data-rate versus range performance for the
various option is derived with results presented shown in Fig.
2. Overall it can be that both the service requirements i.e of
2 Mb/s and 6 Mb/s for a maximum client range of 12m, can
be met with all the available options under no-interference
conditions.
As seen from the figure the highest possible data-rate
achievable per home base station is mainly dependent upon
both the modulation schemes supported and the channel band- Fig. 3. Data-rate versus range comparison using a combination of channel,
width. So, given their modulation schemes are of a similar power schemes in the TVWS band
 However to match the peak data-rate performance of 2.4 or
5 GHz band, TVWS band could employ either use of spectrum
aggregation technique or increase in transmission power. The
results using these two approaches is shown in Fig. 3; note
that the plot for ‘TVWS@700MHz, 9 dBm single channel‘
operation is repeated again for comparison purposes. Due to
sufficient availability of spectrum and with support of cog-
nitive radio technology, a number of single 8 MHz channels
can be combined to increase the peak data-rates of the TVWS
home base station. As seen from the ‘TVWS@700MHz, 3
dBm, 3 channel bonding‘ plot, 3 channels are combined to
triple the effective data-rate without any loss in range. It
should be noted that 802.11n technology in 5 GHz band
already makes use of channel bonding concept and is also
adopted in LTE and WiMAX standards. The net EIRP of
the three channel bonding scheme is 9 dBm and matches
with the current OFCOM policy of setting EIRP limits as
a function of bandwidth in units of dBm/MHz. However as
seen from the ‘TVWS@700MHz, 14 dBm, single channel‘
plot the other approach of increasing power levels does not
bring significant improvements in data-rates. This is because
the system becomes capacity-limited for the given channel
bandwidth. Further, higher power should be avoided for indoor
scenarios as it risks making the system interference limited as
seen in interference study section of this paper.
It should be noted that because interference effects have
been ignored in this section, these results represent the best
possible situation and are only representative of the perfor-
mance that would be achieved with an isolated home base
station. So, it is very unlikely that they will be representative
of what would be achieved in environments comprising a
relatively dense deployment of wireless devices. Therefore,
the next section will build upon the these results by extending
the initial analysis to include interference effects.
IV. I NTERFERENCE STUDY
This section discusses the simulation scenario and the mod-
eling approach used for the interference study. The simulation
results provides insights about the operating conditions when
the system performance would start to become unacceptable.
A. Study scenario and approach
The deployment scenario chosen for the interference study
is a square kilometre coverage area of a dense-urban envi-
ronment representative of a typical UK city and comprises
of approximately 5000 houses. For a given device deployment
density, 40% chosen in the study, selected houses are deployed
with home base stations and is called as home networks. Each
home network is associated with a client within a maximum
distance of 12 metres. The location of home base station
and client within the house is determined by a stochastic
process. Channel numbers assigned to the home networks
are representative of the distributions observed in radio site
surveys. At the detailed calculation level the simulation uses an
approach based on dividing the sq-km area into a grid of one-
square metre cells. Propagation effects as a function of dis-
tance, type and geometry of the houses, number of walls and
floors, etc are captured using appropriate propagation models
at grid level, i.e., one square metre resolution. Interference
from neighbouring home base stations is then introduced at
each client location. The effect of interference as experienced
at the client location, is modeled in terms of achievable signal-
to-interference-and-noise (SINR) ratio, averaged assuming an
average packet size of 1200 bytes under increasing traffic
loads. Three different levels of traffic loading are used to
generate interference
• interference traffic profile comprising of a video-
streaming only traffic, which is modeled as a full buffer
model with a packet always ready to be transmitted.
This traffic assumption represents an unlikely worst-case
interference scenario but considered here to provide a
lower bound performance.
• interference traffic profile of at least 2 Mb/s data-rate
comprising a mix of voice, video and data traffic.
• interference traffic profile of at least 6 Mb/s data-rate
comprising a mix of voice, video and data traffic.
For the mixed interference traffic profiles, as the simulation
run-times for a packet level simulation for home base station
deployment densities selected here, would become unaccept-
ably long, so an analytic simplification based on Poisson
statistics [10] and the Erlang [11] traffic descriptor were used.
The simplification used assumed that a packet stream being
received by a home base station conformed to Poisson arrival
statistics and that the packet size distribution was exponential.
Then, each packet can be treated as an independent event
and the average packet size can be taken to determine the
average hold-time (h), which is one of the parameters needed
to derive the traffic in Erlangs. In this case the average hold-
time is derived by assuming a particular data-rate (R) typical
of 8 Mb/s of the underlying communication link as a good
representative of that received during contended busy hour
period. Total traffic offered to the system was derived by
specifying a packet arrival rate for a single home base station
for the 2 Mb/s or 6 Mb/s data-rate requirement and then
multiplying this by the number of home base stations in the
deployment area. Now the total traffic offered in Erlangs (A)
is simply given by
A = LP /R = Lh (1)
where A is the offered traffic in Erlangs, P is the mean packet
size in bits, L is the total traffic offered in packets per second,
R is the data-rate available during busy hour in bit/s and h is
the average hold-time.
To derive the interference at the home base station client
under study now becomes a statistical problem in that it is
dependent upon how many of the other home base stations are
transmitting a packet at the same time and how far away they
are from the client. Consequently, this is a joint probability
and combinatorics problem; joint probability to derive the
probability of there being exactly n home base stations out
of a total of N , transmitting a packet at the same time and
combinatorics to derive the number of different combinations
of n out of N , because from the perspective of the client the
different combinations potentially create different interference
levels depending upon their distances from the client. For
Poisson flows, the probability of exactly n home base stations
transmitting a packet at the same time as the home base station
under study is given by the incomplete Gamma function [12],
which is
Γ(n + 1, A)
Γn = (2)
Γ(n + 1)
where A is the total traffic offered in Erlangs and Γn is
the probability of up to n out of N home base stations
simultaneously receiving a packet, N being the total number
of home base stations. For analysis purposes, the value of n
for which there was a 5% probability of it being exceeded was
arbitrarily chosen as an analysis metric to derive the number
of different interference combinations.
B. Simulation results
The statistical nature of traffic, client location from the home
base station, distribution of home networks, etc. results in
dynamically varying interference maps, hence the results are
given as a probability of the home base station client base to
meet the set service criterion i.e of 2 Mb/s and 6 Mb/s @12m
range. The plots shown in Fig. 4 presents the simulation results
for the 5 GHz spectral band as a cumulative distribution plot of
the performance of home network clients. This representation
helps in readily understanding the percentage of home network
client base that can meet the particular criteria as explained
below. The x-axis offsets are based on achievable data-rates
which is a function of adaptive coding and modulation or
ultimately SINR ratio at each client location. Few things to
Fig. 4. Cumulative distribution plot of home network performance for various
interference traffic profiles in 5 GHz spectral band
be noted while interpreting the results are
• The different y-offsets (points where the curves cut the
y-axis) reflect the number of clients unable to connect
at the minimum data-rate of 1 Mb/s. These clients are
called as outage clients similar to the outage concept
used in cellular network designs. Results for 5 GHz
band show a low client outage, that is, 3% under all
operating conditions. However for those users unable to
meet the 1 Mb/s data rate requirement, one potential
solution would be to move closer to home base station
as a result of which the 12m boundary would no longer
hold applicable.
• The y-axis values show the percentage of clients that
can achieve or exceed data-rates corresponding to x-axis
values. As shown in the figure, to achieve a minimum
data-rate requirement of 2 Mb/s data-rate, see the vertical
dashed-line corresponding to the 2 Mb/s value on x-axis.
It can be seen from plot that more than 95% the total
client base is able to meet the 2 Mb/s data-rate
• Similarly more than 90% of client base can achieve the
6 Mb/s data-rate requirement.
Fig. 5. Cumulative distribution plot of home network performance for various
interference traffic profiles in 2.4 GHz spectral band
Fig. 6. Cumulative distribution plot of home network performance for various
interference traffic profiles in TVWS spectral band
Results when operating in the 2.4 GHz are shown in Fig.5.
As compared to the 5 GHz performance, there is a significant
degradation of performance due to interference. The y-offsets
show a 20% percentage of outage clients who are not able to
connect at the most basic 1 Mb/s data-rate. Degradation due
to evolving interference with traffic loading is evident from
the widened gap between the three plots and drops to about
75% for the 2 Mb/s and to 55% for 6 Mb/s service criteria.
 Results for TVWS spectral band are shown in Fig. 6.
Overall as seen from the figures 4, 5 and 6 the TVWS spectral
band outperforms other bands for the 2 Mb/s service criteria
and the percentage of outage clients. The results for TVWS
band are shown are with 3 channel bonding technique as
system becomes capacity-limited with single channel band-
width; hence, spectrum aggregation becomes essential. 2.4
GHz performs the worst and has high outage clients, while
for the service requirement is 6 Mb/s, 5 GHz performs the
best.
V. D ISCUSSION
The simulation results show that for a data-rate requirement
of 2 Mb/s, operation in TVWS spectral band gives the best
results. This is achieved at an EIRP of 11 dBm (12.5mW)
below as compared to 2.4 GHz and about 18 dBm (64mW)
below as compared 5 GHz with no penalty in data-rate or
range performance. Transmission at any higher power levels
in fact makes the system interference limited. From a system
perspective this translates in significant energy savings. For
example, assuming a 10 hour daily usage, for a year, with
an energy tariff of 12 pence per kilowatt hour, with a WiFi
device base of 20 million, this translates into yearly savings of
about £9 million. This figure is after ignoring other radio and
electronic inefficiencies when operating at higher frequencies;
i.e., considering client battery life issues, LTE standard has
not selected OFDM technology for uplink.
However systems designed for higher data-rate services
such as 6 Mb/s or above are more likely to be capacity
limited than range limited and then having a better propagation
characteristic starts becoming less important as confirmed by
the simulation results. The 5 GHz band has large availability
of non-overlapping channels and experiences more attenuation
at higher frequencies thus keeping the interference from neigh-
bouring houses at relatively low levels. With use of 802.11n
antenna technology, coverage issues are adequately resolved.
Hence if the indoor data-rate requirements are high, migration
to 5 GHz seems to be the logical step. However the benefits
come at significant energy costs. For lower deployment densi-
ties or lower data-rate performance of TVWS spectrum would
still be better than that of 5 GHz.
Potential benefit of using lower frequencies in the TVWS
band are reduction in penetration loss and increased coverage.
But this is mainly beneficial for range limited operation, and
for broadcast wireless services which are always range limited.
Therefore use of TVWS band would be highly attractive for
range-limited outdoor deployment scenarios such as commu-
nity WiFi networks, open-Femtocells or in rural environments
as the number of base stations needed to provide coverage can
be significantly reduced.
A key insight to be gathered from overall results is that with
the technological convergence trend happening across various
standard bodies, most of the spectrum in the future will be
regulated between the two extremes of command and control
and license-exempt. This view is supported by an increasing
debate within spectrum regulation fora regarding migration
from the current command and control regime towards an
approach based on dynamic spectrum access. TVWS band
with use of cognitive radio technology thus offers potential
opportunity for broad range of applications, including home
networks.
VI. C ONCLUSION
The study shows a sufficient availability of TVWS spectrum
for a majority of population to be considered for home net-
working services. It identifies the operating conditions under
which use of TVWS spectrum for home networks becomes
feasible. It is shown that the performance of TVWS spectral
outperforms the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz for low to medium traffic
loadings (around 2 Mb/s per home). For heavy traffic loadings
(6 Mb/s and above per home) in dense deployment densities,
TVWS band should be used as complementary interface for
congestion relief instead. We conclude that significant energy
savings can be gained by operating the home network in
the TVWS band. However to enable the benefits of TVWS
band, use of spectrum aggregation techniques with support of
cognitive radio technology is essential. We also conclude that
use of any higher power levels, i.e., beyond 3 dBm per channel
risks making the network interference limited. As seen, the
performance of the currently used 2.4 GHz spectrum being the
worst. Finally use of 5 GHz spectral band should be reserved
for high data-rates 6 Mb/s and above, in dense deployment
densities, however this option entails significant energy costs.
VII. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Keith Briggs for providing
the digital TV white space usage data included in section II
of this paper.
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