Performan Study of Television with Spaces (TVWS) Pilot Network in Thailand

Abstract

In this paper, we study the performances of a Television White Space (TVWS) pilot network, which is deployed in a rural and remote region in Northern Thailand. TVWS referring to vacant channels in the Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) band between 510 MHz and 790 MHz assigned for Digital Television (DTV) broadcast and can be used opportunistically by Secondary Users (SUs). The TVWS pilot network provides a point-to-multi-point Internet connectivity to three rural locations. We investigate the basic network performance metrics including the powers of received signals, network throughputs, round-trip latencies, packet losses, and jitters. The performance results show good throughput for each link, which is in the magnitude of 4 to 13 Mbps. The latency and jitter in both point-to-point and point-to-multi-point modes are less than 16 ms for typical packet sizes ranging from 32 to 1500 bytes and less than 2.5 ms, respectively. In addition, the packet loss rate, which is proportional to bit rate, is less than 10% at the data rate of 5 Mbps indicating good performance of the network. The performance is excellent and suitable for voice, video and real-time data transmissions. A TVWS based wireless broadband system can be considered as a good alternative with low cost for both hard-to-access rural areas or for data offloading techniques in dense cellular networks in major cities such as Bangkok and for supporting emerging applications such as Internet of Things (IoT).