Universal Scanning GUI Tool for Available and Usable TV White Space (TVWS) Spectrum

The TV white space (TVWS) technology has proven to be effective and feasible in connecting rural and hard-to-reach areas to Internet service. The TVWS wireless systems operate based on geolocation white space databases (WSDB) to protect the primary systems from harmful interference and thus there is a critical need to know the available and usable channels that can be used by the secondary users in a specific geographic area. In this work, we developed a generalized and flexible universal graphical user interface (GUI) tool to evaluate the availability and usability of the TVWS channels and their noise levels in any specific geographical area. The developed tool has many features and capabilities such as scanning the TVWS spectrum for any geographical area in the world and any TVWS frequency band. Moreover, it allows the user to apply widely used terrain-based radio propagation models. It provides flexibility in importing the elevation terrain profile of any region with the desired spatial accuracy and resolution. In addition, various system parameters including regulation rules can be modified in the tool. This tool exports to an external dataset file the output data of the available and usable channels and their noise levels and it also visualizes these data interactively.