WEST is a tool which makes it easy to evaluate whitespace opportunities with different regulatory sets and for wide variety of geographies. It can be used to make color-coded maps showing the amount of available whitespace like the ones in my research.

See below for an overview of the module's structure and instructions for getting started.

Please send me an email if you have any questions or requests. If your work is also open source (highly encouraged), I'd love to link to your project.

If you use this software for an academic paper, please cite it using this github page:

@misc{west_software,
 author = {Kate Harrison}
 title = {{Whitespace Evaluation SofTware}},
 url={https://github.com/kate-harrison/west}
}

Please also make sure you read and abide by the terms of the license (GPLv2). If the terms of the license are not suitable for your application, please contact me: I may be willing to release under a more permissive license if necessary.

Please feel free to fork this code and send me a pull request if you make any changes you'd like to share with the world. I'm very interested in seeing this code base develop further.

Kate Harrison

• UC Berkeley graduate student in EECS
• harriska at eecs dot berkeley dot edu
• kateharrison.net

WEST was inspired by the author's experience with her previous whitespace evaluation software which is written in Matlab and is very US-centric. WEST is intended to be modular and extensible so that users can easily add their own support for different propagation models, rulesets, and geographies.

1. Clone this repository.
2. Install the west module by running sh install_west.sh from the root directory.
3. Install dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt
4. In $REPO_ROOT/documentation, run python document_all.py. View documentation at $REPO_ROOT/documentation/_build/html/index.html.
5. Outside of the repository, use import west to import the module. Working inside the repository may compromise your ability to generate documentation.
6. Look at the code samples in the examples/ directory for next steps.

There are several key module types in WEST.

• DataMap (DataMap2D or DataMap3D): the standard format for data is a 2-D matrix with geographical metadata. A DataMap3D allows for aggregation of DataMap2D objects.
• Population: reads in population data and creates a population DataMap2D.
• Region: specifies various parameters about a region such as which channels are available for whitespace use and the set of protected entities.
• Boundary: specifies the boundary of the given region; mostly used for plotting purposes.
• ProtectedEntity: specifies an entity (e.g. TV station) that may be eligible for protection.
• ProtectedEntities: a collection of ProtectedEntity objects (e.g. the set of all TV stations in the United States).
• Ruleset: describes how to protect various entities.
• Specification: describes an experiment in a parametrized way; used to quickly recall or generate data.

Further documentation on each of these modules can be found via step 3 in the "Getting started" section.

• Regions
  • Continental United States (2010 census data)
• Rulesets and protected entities
  • FCC's 2012 ruleset for TV whitespaces
  • TV, PLMRS, and radioastronomy protections
• Propagation models
  • FCC's F-curves (without terrain)

I am very interested in expanding support. Please send me an email if you'd like to collaborate.