5G multi‐layer routing strategies for TV white space secondary user access

Abstract

As mobile applications and services have developed, the dramatic growth in user data traffic has led to the legacy channels becoming ever more congested with the commensurate requirement for more spectrum. This has motivated both regulatory bodies and industry to investigate innovative strategies to increase the existing spectral efficiency. Prominent examples include both Long Term Evolution (LTE) which employs orthogonal frequency-division modulation technology to improve bandwidth efficiency, and heterogeneous networks, which facilitate the offloading of data traffic between technologies such as from LTE to Wi-Fi and vice versa. Furthermore, as 5G mobile technology and related standards mature, there is an impetus to address the issue of secondary user (SU) spectrum access in which TV White Space (TVWS) is the prime contender. Two nascent viewpoints have emerged as to how this will evolve: i) greater coverage, ii) increased throughput allied with lower latency. This paper presents a novel TVWS framework that successfully fulfils both criteria to ensure 5G services can both exploit TVWS spectrum and protect the benefits of SU access and quality-of-service provision by using a routing strategy on the Access Network Discovery and Selection Function server to dynamically determine the most suitable heterogeneous technology for the new framework.