A Comprehensive Survey on Networking over TV White Spaces

TV white spaces refer to the allocated but locally unused TV spectrum and can be used by unlicensed devices as secondary users. Thanks to their lower frequencies (e.g., 54 -- 698 MHz in the US), communication over the TV spectrum has excellent propagation characteristics over long distances and through obstacles. These characteristics along with their wide availability make the TV white spaces a great choice and alternative to many existing wireless technologies, especially the ones that need long range and high bandwidth communication. In the last decade, there have been numerous efforts from academia, industries, and standards bodies for exploiting the potentials of the TV white spaces for several applications including wireless broadband Internet access. Their characteristics and features also hold potentials for many new applications including sensing and monitoring, Internet of Things, wireless control, smart utility, location-based services, and transportation and logistics. In this paper, we perform a retrospective review and comparative study of existing work on networking in the TV white spaces. Additionally, we discuss the associated research challenges such as dealing with the interference between primary and secondary TV spectrum users, TV white space temporal and spatial variations and fragmentation, antenna design, mobility, and security. We also describe the future research directions to handle the above challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey on the literature of TV white space networking research.