Power and latency limitations in secondary spectrum reuse for mobile and home wireless systems

The exceedingly spectrum-poor regulatory environment calls for new ways of efficiently accessing spectrum to meet the bandwidth requirements of next generation telecommunications systems. This paper studies receiver power consumption and latency with regards to spectral reuse and shows how optimising for latency yields reduced energy consumption and additionally enables the receiver to leverage shorter white space opportunities for communication. A survey of several OFDM receivers conducted, provides a discretised breakdown of the receive chain with the power and latency incurred per stage, to identify limitations of current OFDM technologies with respect to spectrum reuse. A whitespace access cost model is then proposed to illustrate the cost of accessing whitespace and when it is an energy efficient decision. The study concludes that future receiver and telecommunications standards and designs should be more closely coupled to leverage latency of operation to minimise UE energy consumption.