Performance Analysis of Dual 5 GHz WiFi and UHF TV White Space Network Links

Commonly used WiFi is known to be ill-suited for penetrating vegetation and buildings and non-line-of-sight conditions. Television white space (TVWS) operates in ultra-high frequency (UHF) bands that overcome many of the penetration and line-of-sight challenges found in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands normally used by WiFi. The aim of this study is to report on the performance of WiFi technology in the 5 GHz band and the TVWS technology in the 600 MHz UHF TV band as well as a combination of both radios in two different scenarios, short-range clear line-of-sight, and non-line-of-sight conditions. A number of performance metrics, such as estimated throughput, bitrate, signal strength, noise, transmit power, transmit error, packet loss, and round trip time, are compared for varied distances and increasing levels of vegetation in the propagation path. Both TVWS and WiFi experiments showed increased sensitivity to noise as channel widths increased with TVWS being particularly susceptible to noise in nearby channels from powerful TV transmitters. Aggregating the WiFi and TVWS radios proved to have the best performance improvements when the WiFi and TVWS links had similar throughput in line-of-sight conditions.