White space backup network architecture for the connection continuity of wired and wireless access networks

In the past decade, we have witnessed accelerated and multi-faceted developments in hyper-connected world, providing wired/wireless licensed or unlicensed-based access networks such as DSL, cable, or WiFi™, cellular and WiMAX networks. Today, since we have virtually unlimited digital data in the network accessible from everywhere, a divers set of contents and aggressive traffic have accentuated the issues of congestion and reliability due to the prominence of trouble in network access. Particularly, to the specialized access networks operating for public safety, business transactions, and military operations, a broken Internet or wide area network (WAN) connection can cause serious consequences if they have no alternative reliable access networks or only unreliable paths on unlicensed-based access networks. This paper proposes the white space backup network that operates on unused TV spectrum to provide alternative paths with a better reliability than conventional unlicensed-based access networks. The numerical results of performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed white space backup network can contribute to less time delay in the delivery of messages or transactions than the time delay of the conventional approach, which waits the recovery. Since this time savings is a crucial benefit to time-critical applications, we expect the deployment of the white space backup networks can assist those applications to achieve a shorter processing time even under a broken Internet or WAN connection.