On the relevance of using affordable tools for white spaces identification

It is widely recognized that white spaces identification is an important milestone for the wide deployment of next generation cognitive wireless networks. However, spectrum holes detection tools used for white spaces discovery are still either in the infancy stage or too expensive to enable massive white spaces exploitation. Building upon cheap hardware equipment, this paper presents experiments conducted in the town of Trieste in Italy to sense the environment and find out which frequencies are not being used in a particular place and time-of-the-day. As a a step towards white spaces exploitation, we believe that our experimental frequency exploration is an important milestone upon which white spaces patterns recognition will be built with the aim of using these patterns in wireless network planning and management.