Mobile TV White Space with Multi-Region Based Mobility Procedure

Current regulations require that portable unlicensed devices operating in TV white space perform a channel availability query (CAQ) before transmitting whenever they move more than 100m. Since this mobility constraint gives rise to frequent CAQs, the Federal Communications Commission allows a region-based mobility procedure (RMP) to help reduce the number of CAQs. Since the performance of the RMP cannot be precisely evaluated based only on the number of CAQs, in this letter, we formulate an achievable throughput in terms of the average number of available channels, the effective data transmission time, and the TV band database fees. We discover that the achievable throughput for the conventional single RMP is degraded when the radius of the region is not properly determined. In order to alleviate this performance degradation, we propose a multi-RMP using multiple radii in order to obtain multiple available channel lists. Simulation results show that the proposed multi-RMP can mitigate the performance degradation. In addition, the use of multi-RMP enhances the maximum throughput compared to the single RMP.