Quantifying secondary spectrum Whitespace Opportunity Distributions

There is a lack of comprehensive and generally accepted secondary spectrum analysis methods for evaluating short timescale whitespace opportunities. High resolution time and frequency measurements generate enormous amounts of multidimensional data, posing a significant challenge in visualising the dataset. This work presents the construction of a novel 'Whitespace Opportunity Distribution' for quantifying the availability of spectrum resources within an observed secondary spectrum environment. Two different spectrum use cases are examined and measured to contrast whitespace availability based on incumbent spectrum usage. The dimensionality of spectrum measurement data is reduced by applying a known NP-Hard partitioning problem to successfully capture discrete whitespace opportunities at millisecond timescales and sub kilohertz resolutions, enabling the available spectrum resources to be quantified.