A review of TV Whitespace portable devices

The release of the TV White Space (TVWS) spectrum for portable devices by FCC opened up new opportunities for wireless applications. The propagation characteristics at TVWS band are far better than the 2.4 and/or 5 GHz unlicensed bands and transceiver implementation is also relatively less expensive. All these advantages appear to make this available spectrum extremely attractive for wireless applications. However the spectrum also offers challenges especially to portable devices particularly related to interference avoidance, sensing, radio implementation and managing out-of-band (OOB) emissions. This paper presents an overview and challenges associated with the use of whitespace devices, particularly, power requirements as well as portable device and spectrum sensing issues.