First Cognitive Radio Networking Standard for Personal/Portable Devices in TV White Spaces

Recent FCC rules allowing unlicensed use on a secondary basis of the Television White Spaces (TVWS) promise a whole new set of possible applications. The first step towards realizing these applications is the creation and adoption of industry standards. In this paper we present the first such standard for personal/portable devices in the TVWS that complies fully with the existing FCC rules while retaining flexibility for use with other regulatory domains. We describe the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers specified in the standard and present performance results to demonstrate the robustness and spectral efficiency of the proposed protocols.