Open and Regionalised Spectrum Repositories for Emerging Countries

TV White Spaces have recently been proposed as an alter- native to alleviate the spectrum crunch, characterised by the need to reallocate frequency bands to accommodate the ever-growing demand for wireless communications. In this paper, we discuss the motivations and challenges for col- lecting spectrum measurements in developing regions and discuss a scalable system for communities to gather and provide access to White Spaces information through open and regionalised repositories. We further discuss two rele- vant aspects. First, we propose a cooperative mechanism for sensing spectrum availability using a detector approach. Second, 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 mea- surement campaign showing a number of white spaces in de- veloping 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