Radio spectrum is a valuable resource. In most places, radio spectrum is allocated by strict licensing to wireless communication suppliers. But some radio spectrum is being left idle, e.g. TV white spaces. Researchers at CUHK and Microsoft Corp. have successfully developed a new system, WISER (White-space Indoor Spectrum EnhanceR), that improves indoor access to radio frequency spectrum which can enhance the performance of wireless technologies.

Prof. Chen Minghua of the Department of Information Engineering said, 'TV spectrum could provide a significant amount of additional spectrum for wireless communications. Microsoft and we have been collaborating on using unused indoors TV spectrum in urban locations since 2010. On average we found 40% more TV spectrum to be available indoors, but there was no prior study showing how to use this additional spectrum.'

WISER is able to identify as much vacant spectrum as possible without causing interference by tapping into spectrum that is already in use. To evaluate the system's real-world performance, the researchers built and tested a WISER prototype in the Ho Sin-Hang Engineering Building on CUHK campus. The results show that WISER can identify 30 to 50 per cent more indoor white spaces than other approaches.

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