Tethering over TV White-Space: Dynamic Hotspot Selection and Resource Allocation

In dense wireless areas where the cellular spectrum resources are insufficient, the conventional approach is to install more base-stations (BS) or offload some of the traffic onto unlicensed WiFi bands. Both approaches require adding new infrastructure that might be necessary for only a short time. Taking advantage of dual-hop communication, frequency reuse policies, and opportunistic use of white-spaces, this paper proposes an algorithm for operator-controlled tethering over TV white-space (TVWS). As such, in a dense wireless area, some nodes can act as hotspots and tether data to and from their corresponding slaves over TVWS. The proposed algorithm iteratively clusters the nodes into hotspots and slaves, and allocates resources with the objective of maximizing spectrum utilization. Evaluations show that the proposed algorithm can effectively exploit TVWS spectra, and given a fixed amount of network resources, it can significantly increase the number of supported users.