Performance Analysis of Multi-OEM TV White Space Radios in Outdoor Environments

The television white space (TVWS) spectrum presents a promising opportunity to extend wireless broadband access, particularly in rural, underserved, and hard-to-reach communities. To leverage this potential, low-power radio communication equipment must efficiently utilise the TVWS spectrum on a secondary basis while ensuring strict compliance with regulatory requirements to prevent harmful interference to primary services. This paper presents a comparative performance analysis of TVWS radio equipment from three original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The equipment under test was identified to reflect each OEM, as follows: OEM 1 and OEM 2 from South Korea and OEM 3 from the USA. We evaluated their performance in two real-world field scenarios, namely outdoor short-distance and outdoor long-distance. The evaluation was based on the following key metrics: (i) spectrum utilisation efficiency (SUE), (ii) received signal strength (RSS), (iii) downlink throughput, and (iv) connectivity to the Geo-Location Spectrum Database (GLSD) in compliance with the South African TVWS regulatory framework. The overall preliminary experimental results indicate that in both scenarios, white space devices (WSDs) based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11af Standard demonstrated better performance than those based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (3GPP LTE-A) Standard in terms of the SUE, downlink throughput, and RSS metrics. All WSDs under test demonstrated sufficient compliance with the regulatory requirement metric.