Enabling Smart Grid via TV White Space Cognitive Radio

The attractive characteristics of the TV White Space makes it the ideal candidate for enabling multiple and independently-operated secondary networks via Cognitive Radio paradigm. However, so far, there are no regulatory requirements for the coexistence among heterogenous secondary networks over TVWS. Hence, their mutual interference can be very severe. This issue is even more crucial in urban Smart Grid scenarios, where the latency and energy requirements are very tight and multiple Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) are likely to be located within the same geographical area. Hence, in this paper, the problem of the interference among multiple NANs is addressed with the objective to maximize the achievable data rate. To this aim, the Gateway senses the TVWS channel declared available from incumbents by the WSDB to discover the presence of an interfering NAN. If the sensing declares the TVWS channel as idle, the Gateway can transmit over such a channel. Otherwise, the Gateway uses the ISM channel. Within the paper, the choice of the sensing duration maximizing the achievable data rate at the Gateway, by explicitly accounting for the accuracy/overhead trade-off and the co-located NANs traffic patterns, is addressed. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis.