Abstract
A comparative study of the performance of the TV White space (TVWS) network and WiFi is presented. The Software Defined Radios and Cognitive Network Technology have presented many opportunities and possibilities, which advances the wireless technology. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the TVWS technology in comparison with the legacy broadband WiFi technology. The TVWS technology utilizes the spectrum holes in the broadcasting frequency bands. The vacant frequencies can be used opportunistically by the TVWS technology in providing broadband solutions to rural areas among other areas. It is therefore imperative to investigate the effectiveness of this technology and its performance in relation to existing technologies. The comparative study of TVWS and WiFi is therefore presented. For this study, performance-monitoring techniques were employed to analyze the basic performance metrics such as throughput and latency of the TVWS and WiFi technologies. To evaluate the performance of the technologies, two-performance analysis tools were used, Internet performance open group (Iperf) and Java Performance/Scalability Testing Framework (jperf) tool. Speedtest was also used as an additional tool. The performance data were gathered and analyzed. The results show that the performance of the TVWS of the University of Limpopo trial network still requires significant improvement for it to at least match the performance of the legacy technologies such as WiFi.
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Mkhabela, B.F., Velempini, M. (2018). An Evaluation of the Performance of the University of Limpopo TVWS Trial Network. In: Mekuria, F., Nigussie, E., Dargie, W., Edward, M., Tegegne, T. (eds) Information and Communication Technology for Development for Africa. ICT4DA 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 244. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95153-9_30
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