White Space Networking With Wi-Fi Like Connectivity

Overview

Networking over UHF white spaces is fundamentally different from conventional Wi-Fi along three axes: spatial variation, temporal variation, and fragmentation of the UHF spectrum. Each of these differences gives rise to new challenges for implementing a wireless network in this band. The paper presents the design and implementation of WhiteFi, the first Wi-Fi like system constructed on top of UHF white spaces. WhiteFi incorporates a new adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm to handle spectrum variation and fragmentation, and proposes a low overhead protocol to handle temporal variation. WhiteFi builds on a simple technique, called SIFT, that reduces the time to detect transmissions in variable channel width systems by analyzing raw signals in the time domain.