IEEE draft standard P1900.4a for architecture and interfaces for dynamic spectrum access networks in white space frequency bands: Technical overview and feasibility study

The IEEE standard 1900.4 “Architectural Building Blocks Enabling Network-Device Distributed Decision Making for Optimized Radio Resource Usage in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks” was published in February 2009. It considers three use cases: distributed radio resource usage optimization, dynamic spectrum assignment, and dynamic spectrum sharing. In the dynamic spectrum sharing use case, several radio systems share the same frequency band. One example of this use case is when several radio systems operate in unlicensed spectrum. Another example is when a secondary radio system operates in white space of a TV broadcast operator frequency band. The last example starts to attract a lot of attention recently including a lot of standardization activities. The IEEE draft standard P1900.4a for “Architecture and interfaces for dynamic spectrum access networks in white space frequency bands” is one of such activities. P1900.4a uses IEEE standard 1900.4 as a baseline. It defines additional entities and interfaces to enable efficient operation of white space wireless systems. This paper gives detailed description of P1900.4a system.¹ Also, it shows experimental results that our prototype system conforming to the draft standard can detect the white space and reconfigure itself to operate on it.