IETF PAWS WG (Protocol for Accessing White Spaces)

Scope and objectives

The charter for this WG was established 14 June 2011. Generally, the IETF strives to utilise established protocols rather than develop new ones. The objecives of this WG are:

Standardise a mechanism for discovering a white space database
Standardise a mechanism for accessing a white space database
Standardise query and response formats to be carried over the database access method
Ensure that the discovery mechanism, database access method and query response formats have appropriate security levels in place.

The WG goals are:

April 2012 Submit ‘Use-cases and Requirements for Accessing a Radio White Space Database’ to the IESG for publication as Informational. The current draft of this document is here: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-paws-problem-stmt-usecases-rqmts /
December 2012, Submit ‘Accessing a Radio White Space Database’ to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard.

The next IETF meeting is March 25 – 30^th 2012 in Paris. The WG active participants are Neustar and Nokia (chairs), plus Telcordia, Huawei, BT, EarthLink, Intel, and some start-ups. The problem statement is as follows:

Global applicability
Database discovery (seems to address open and closed cases)
Protocol (including credentials)
Data model definition.

Technical relevance to QoSMOS

The use-cases are as follows:

TVWS database discovery
Device registration with trusted Database
Hotspot: urban internet connectivity service (small cells)
Wide-Area or Rural internet broadband access
Offloading: moving traffic to a white space network
TVWS for backhaul
Rapid deployed network for emergency scenario Mobility*
Indoor Networking*
Machine to Machine (M2M)*

The last three use-cases (marked *) were contributed by BT on behalf of QoSMOS.

An issue still under debate is whether there should be a feedback signal from the TVWS device to the database, in order to inform the database which channels the TVWS device has chosen to use. This mechanism is considered by QoSMOS to be essential to enable fairness and co-operation etiquette to operate between databases. This is not the concern of regulators, who are interested only in protecting the licensed services. It is not in the original scope of the PAWS WG, but we are arguing that it should be included.

Status and outlook for QoSMOS

In terms of future engagement by QoSMOS, we will ensure that:

the use-cases that QoSMOS want are retained
there is no inhibition to distributed database structures
the data-model is scalable, and is compatible with QoSMOS structures and topologies
the protocol is extensible with regard to messages.