FIWEX: Compressive Sensing Based Cost-Efficient Indoor White Space Exploration

Dongxin Liu, Zhihao Wu, Fan Wu, Yuan Zhang, Guihai Chen

Abstract: Exploring the utilization of white spaces (vacant VHF and UHF TV channels) is a promising way to satisfy the rapid growth of the radio frequency (RF) demand. Although a few outdoor white space exploration methods have been proposed in the past few years, researches that focus on indoor white space exploration just emerge recently. In this paper, we propose a novel cost-efficient indoor white space exploration method by exploiting the location dependence and channel dependence of TV channels' signal strength in indoor environments. We measure the UHF TV channels in a building, and study the temporal and spatial features of indoor white spaces. Based on the extracted features, we design a cost-eficient Indoor White space EXploration mechanism, namely FIWEX. Furthermore, we build a prototype of FIWEX and extensively evaluate its performance in real world environments. The evaluation results show that FIWEX can identify 47.8% more indoor white spaces with 38.4% less false alarms compared with the best known existing solution.