Gerardo Martínez Pinzón

This thesis deals with the issue about coexistence between television and fourth generation mobile networks within the band of the first digital dividend (700 MHz band), in South America. Moreover, two potential cases of sharing spectrum for future use of the television band after the digital dividends are suggested as an efficient and flexible way for usage of the radio spectrum. In order to ensure the coexistence between the television and mobile technologies within the band of the first digital dividend in South America, the impact of the mobile networks as well as the opposite case are assessed. The technical operation parameters for each of the involved networks defined by standardizing organisms or real parameters from implemented networks in each country are considered. Among the technical parameters that were defined for the networks, we can mention: protection ratio between television and mobile signals; protection distances between the interfering transmitter and the victim receiver; required guard bands between both technologies; maximum power of the interfering out-of-band emissions in adjacent channels; additional attenuation levels in the spectrum emission mask in transmission and reception; assessing of interference mitigation techniques, among others. It is important to highlight that the main differences between the coexistence studies for South America and Europe are: the guard bands in South America are 5 MHz whereas in Europe are 9 MHz; bandwidth for a channel in South America is 6 MHz in contrast with the 8 MHz of Europe; the television standard adopted in almost all South America is ISDB-Tb, except Colombia and the French Guiana, which adopted DVB-T2. Additionally, within the scope of this thesis, two potential study cases for future usage of the TV band are proposed, promoting sharing spectrum as an efficient access way: The first study we go a step beyond coexistence, since the aim is to exploit the unused radio spectrum in those geographical zones that are not covered because the useful signal is obstructed by the environment or it has a limited coverage by the network design. Those areas can be called "micro-TVWS" (µ-TV-White-Space). The most representative cases of our definition of µ-TV-White-Space are those indoor environments in areas where DTT received power is below the required sensitivity because a TV channel is broadcasted to rooftop reception. The proposed scenario considers a DTT network offering fixed rooftop reception as a primary service, and a LTE-A femtocell giving coverage within the interior of a home or office as a secondary service. Our results provide the technical restrictions of the LTE-A Femtocell, mainly on the maximum allowable Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) that could transmit on the DTT band in terms of carrier separation, from co-channel to adjacent band. The second study case, suggests the use of white spaces for spectrum sharing among the Internet of Things (IoT) services, under the NB-LTE-IoT standard, as secondary service, and digital terrestrial television services under the DVB-T2 standard, as primary service. The maximum transmissible power by the nodes and IoT devices without interfering the primary service is defined. Besides, the impact of the duty cycle of the devices is assessed considering that there will be a great diversity of applications, and thus, a great diversity of operation requirements. The significance of this proposal is due to two contributions: on the aone hand, the usage of the television band is optimized through secondary access of low power devices within the white spaces, always ensuring television services as primary service. On the other hand, new frequencies for last generation mobile technologies are given, with the aim at increasing the network capacity, which will bear mobile services as well as IoT, regarding the high challenge of offering connectivity to millions of devices during the next decade.