Database access strategy for TV White Space cognitive radio networks

Very recently, city administrations launched TV White Space wireless networks to enable the smart city paradigm. These initiatives leverage the possibility allowed by regulations of unlicensed access to the TV White Space spectrum. All theses rulings rely on a periodic access to a database service as the primary mechanism for the unlicensed users to determine the White Space availability. Nevertheless, the specifics of such a mechanism are yet to be determined. In this paper, we address this issue by designing a database access strategy that allows unlicensed users to: i) respect the requirements imposed by the existing rulings; ii) maximize the expected communication opportunities provided by the TV White Space through the on-demand database accesses. To this aim, we prove the database access problem can be modeled as a Markov Decision Process and we provide the closed-form expressions of the transition probabilities. The analytical results are finally validated through simulations.