Using Femtocells in TV White Space: Overview and Challenges

Femtocells were proposed to be used in indoor environments and increase the capacity of the cellular network. They are not part of the cellular planning of the local operator but its frequency of operation is the same used in the macrocell network. In this way, they introduce interference in the system, being one of the biggest challenges the reduction of interference with the macrocell network. TV White Space (TVWS), which is the portion of reserved TV spectrum that is not used temporarily, is being considered as an opportunity to solve the spectrum shortage using cognitive radios. In this paper, the proposal to use TV White Space as the operating frequency of the femtocells is studied. It shows an overview, some key challenges for research, and deduces the search directions in the topic.