Video transmission based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) utilizing television white space

Television white space (TVWS) is an underutilized spectrum that can be one of the possible solutions for spectrum scarcity problem in wireless communication. This paper presents a development of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based video transmission using software defined radio (SDR) platform in television white space. Two types of modulation schemes are used namely Phase-shift keying (PSK) and Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for video transmission in an indoor environment under ultra high frequency (UHF) band. The proposed system is developed with the physical layer design of transmitter and receiver in GNU radio and integration of medium access control layer functionality. A video capture and display program are designed based on OpenCV modules. Experiment results have shown that under allocated bandwidth of 1.0 MHz, QPSK exhibits the best performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and end to end delay for slow motion video while BPSK performs better for fast and medium motion videos.