TV white space utility in urban and rural environments

The interest in using TV white space spectrum for unlicensed wireless communication has been growing in recent years, due to increasing demands for wireless broadband access and spectrum scarcity. An open question is how to assess the potential of TV white spaces. In this paper, a comparison between urban and rural environments is presented, with the focus on TV white space capacity. A new metric, the TV white space utility, is derived, which explicitly takes white space user densities into account. With the help of this metric it is possible to estimate the potential of the available spectrum and to compare different scenarios. Simulation results are presented which reveal that TV coverage is not the dominant factor influencing the achievable white space capacity. Rather, the main reasons for limited TV white space utility in urban environments are high user densities and congestion.