Development of Database Accessibility for Frequency Scheduling of TVWS Broadband Connectivity in Rural Areas Using Dynamic Spectrum Access Technique

Abstract

As a result of the switchover from analogue to digital transmission, Television White Space (TVWS) presented itself as good opportunity to supplement the existing licensed spectrum to ease the spectrum scarcity. Rural communities were usually not connected due to poor returns to the internet providers to provide broadband access to the areas. This research has prepared the framework and feasibility study for deploying broadband internet services using Television White Space (TVWS) technology in Ugbawka, a rural area in Enugu state, Nigeria. In this work, a Network Ping was run on five websites using three major internet service providers as backhaul to establish facts of poor or even non-existent internet services. Using Ping Plotter 5 Pro, accessing ieee.com using MTN yielded a Round Trip (RT) average of 846.433 ms, with a loss of 83.8% packet over 10mins count. Radio Frequency (RF) Explorer and Carlson transceiver, Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) were used for field trials to determine availability of TVWS Frequencies. A database app was developed by writing some codes in the Basic for Android (B4A) Intermediate Development Environment (IDE). Empirical outdoor propagation model was developed with a 2.15 pathloss exponent while the indoor propagation model gave a pathloss exponent of 3.47 . An algorithm was developed, titled, TVWS Optimization Quadrature Amplitude Algorithm, (TOQA), where throughput of this project performed better by giving 60Mbps and 70 Mbps at Signal-Noise-Ratio (SNR) of 5dB while the conventional algorithm gave 30Mbps and 25 Mbps at same SNR value. The Bit Error Rate was lower than the conventional models used, giving the TOQA values of 10-3 at SNR of 5 dB and 10-6 at SNR of 30 dB while the conventional method gave 10-1 and 10-3 respectively at the same SNR values. With an Average of 56.2% network latency recorded in Ugbawka, TVWS will make a great impact on Internet connectivity if deployed.