Investigation of channel bonding based on TV White Space spectrum occupancy for urban areas in Malaysia

The paper investigate the cognitive radio opportunity to utilize Television White Spaces (TVWS) spectrum in Malaysian urban areas according to time and location. Data has been collected from eight different urban areas in Malaysia to measure the spectrum occupancy and received signal strength level. Channel bonding is a technique of searching and combining unoccupied contiguous channels, which resulted in wider bandwidth for multiple TVWS channels. The outcome of this study suggests that Malaysia has a potential for developing TVWS activities such as implements extended wireless local area network (White-Fi) to accommodate demands for future wireless services. This paper also investigates the number of channels can be bond according to the signal bandwidth based on White-Fi wireless standard (IEEE 802.11af). The results show the maximum and minimum bandwidth size for the eight urban areas. The findings from this paper are important to provide a feasibility to develop a novel dynamic channel bonding technique in our future work.