How much TV White Space is there in Germany?

Abstract:
Secondary usage of locally unused TV channels, so called TV White Spaces, is d iscussed as a promising way to increase utilization of a technically and economically very important frequency range, and at the same time to make additional spectrum available for e.g. mobile broadband communication. In Europe a regulatory framework has been developed within the CEPT ECC [1], which describes a comprehensive methodology for determining White Space availability based on a geo-location database. Our paper investigates the White Space availability for the example case of Germany by applying this methodology. Our results show that the dependency of the allowed transmit power on location foreseen in the European method creates a trade-off between wanted transmit power of the White Space devices and channel availability, i.e. more channels are available for lowpower devices, while less channels can be utilized if h igher transmit powers are required.