A TV white space broadband market model for rural entrepreneurs

The paper presents an analytic TV white space market model for rural entrepreneurs for provisioning broadband internet access within the context of a low cost design of a smart mesh network. The smart mesh is a hybrid network of WiMAX base station (BS) and WiFi Access points (APs) that belong to different entrepreneurs participating in TV white space trading. This interaction of entities is viewed as a pricing problem where a BS seeks to maximize profit by selling secondary spectrum and WiFi APs strive to satisfy their customers demand by acquiring as much secondary spectrum as possible. The pricing problem is subsequently formulated as a leader-follower Stackelberg game in an oligopolistic market, with WiMAX BS station as leader and APs as followers. Inter-operator agreement between Leader and follower is based on throughput as the Quality of service (QoS) performance metric. Analytically a direct dependence between the throughput and price paid exists, meaning users are able to determine their QoS based on willingness to pay. The implication of the model is that of its applicability in spectrum management and provision of broadband Internet access to schools in rural and remote areas like the Limpopo province in South Africa.