Indoor Use of Gray and White Spaces: Another Look at Wireless Indoor Communication

Television (TV) white space (WS) constitutes a key technology to support the increasing worldwide growth of spectrum demand with several regulation standards that are already available for long-and medium-range communications. At the same time, estimations based on WS spectrum databases (SDBs) indicate that the availability of TVWS is often very limited in dense urban areas where spectrum resources are more needed. Therefore, the benefits provided by the utilization of TVWS have yet to be fully assessed. In this article, we rethink the utilization of TVWS in indoor communication environments through novel three-dimensional (3-D) spectrum-sharing mechanisms. Based on measurements that demonstrate the differences in terms of spectrum opportunities at different floors of the same building, we propose an underlay spectrum-sharing architecture to enable a per-building finegrained reuse of TV frequencies while protecting the operations of TV receivers in a neighborhood. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed spectrum-sharing architecture over several urban environments in Italy by taking into account many real characteristics of the scenarios. Our results demonstrate that through our architecture, more spectrum resources than what are reported in the SDB can be available for indoor scenarios, even in highly congested urban areas, paving the way to novel TVWS applications.