Introduction to Cognitive Radio and Television White Space

Wireless communication is a key enabler for smart systems such as smart cities, autonomous ports, and so on. This chapter explores various aspects of the spectrum, including their utilizations, the future needs, and why do we need more agile and dynamic spectrum access technologies. In Asia, Singapore is the leader in television white space (TVWS) development where the cognitive radio venue (CRAVE) trial was conducted. Subsequently, the Singapore white spaces pilot group (SWSPG) was formed by the Institute for Infocomm Research, Microsoft, and Star Hub to look at commercial pilots of TVWS technologies. TVWS becomes the first spectrum open to cognitive radio (CR) for real application for better spectrum utilization. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is one type of CR system. The major parameter that DSA needs to detect is frequency availability, which indicates the other users' spectrum utilization in the same working area.