Work in Television White Spaces (TVWS) and Dynamic Spectrum and a bit on Antennas

Abstract

There is a need for work around improving frequency spectrum utilization efficiency to support the South African government targets of 100% broadband by 2020, with tough specifications stated by the National Broadband Policy “South Africa Connect” (2014), e.g. each school needs Internet connectivity of at least 10 Mbps. The research and development in our research group at CSIR includes work on smarter antennas for wireless networking as well as advancing the spectrum management to move from its current static approach towards dynamic spectrum management. The work on smart antennas covers both physical beamswitching antenna design and development of algorithms to control the direction of the beam in a wireless mesh network. Several prototypes have been developed and demonstrated an increase in the throughput and reduction in latency 2-3 times on average, in a busy network scenario.