Compatibility between Cognitive Radio and the Terrestrial Digital Broadcasting Services in the Digital Dividend Band

The switching from analogue to digital broadcasting created newly freed spectrum in the band 470-862 MHz called Digital Dividend band. The sub-band 470-790 MHz is reserved for terrestrial digital broadcasting; however, the band is not fully utilized in many countries and the sharing of it is needed. The cognitive radio system gives the opportunity to share the licensed spectrum without causing interference to the primary service. In this paper, an overview of the compatibility between the cognitive radio system and the terrestrial digital broadcasting in the band 470-790 MHz is conducted. This is done based on the studies, methodologies, results and recommendations conducted by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication administration in 2011. Our study investigates the new proposed sensing methodologies for cognitive radio system. The study shows that sensing method is not efficient as a stand-alone technique for the compatibility between cognitive radio system and digital broadcasting systems, whereas the geolocation database is the current most efficient technique.