Radio Spectrum Occupancy Measurement from 30MHz-1030MHz in Pakistan

Cognitive radio (CR) technologies can be used to harvest unoccupied spectrum bands to meet the growing data rate demands of many emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and smart grid applications. In Pakistan, radio spectrum from 30MHz-1030MHz has been allocated to various services including analog TV broadcasts and cellular operators. In this paper, we attempt to quantify actual spectrum usage in these bands in order to gauge the potential of CR based services. Such measurement campaigns and spectrum occupancy results are largely unavailable for Pakistan. In our survey, we study the 24 hour spectrum usage pattern with measurements taken over 10 weekday periods at our university campus in Lahore. Our results reveal that on average very large amount of spectrum remains unoccupied for most of the time at the site of our study. Radio spectrum in the range of 30MHz-174MHz showed highest variation in the utilization rate ranging from 2.56% to 95%. More than two third of the spectrum in the range of 174MHz-850MHz remained severely under-utilized in our observations. The spectrum in the range of 850MHz-1030MHz occupied by the cellular operators had relatively high minimum occupancy of 25% with an average spectrum occupancy of only 35.41%. These observations call for more efficient allocation and utilization of radio spectrum in Pakistan.

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