Towards Commoditized Real-time Spectrum Monitoring
Ana Nika
Zengbin Zhang
Xia Zhou
Ben Y. Zhao
Haitao Zheng
Proceedings of ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Wireless Networks (HotWireless 2014)
[Full Text in PDF Format, 237KB]
Paper Abstract
We are facing an
increasingly difficult challenge in spectrum management: how to perform
real-time spectrum monitoring with strong coverage of deployed regions. Today's spectrum measurements are carried out by government employees
driving around with specialized hardware that is usually bulky and
expensive, making the task of gathering real-time, large-scale spectrum
monitoring data extremely difficult and cost prohibitive.
In this paper, we propose a solution to the spectrum monitoring problem by
leveraging the power of the masses, i.e. millions of wireless users,
using low-cost, commoditized spectrum monitoring hardware. We envision an ecosystem
where crowdsourced smartphone users perform automated and continuous spectrum
measurements using their mobile devices, and report the results to a
monitoring agency in real-time. We perform an initial feasibility study to
verify the efficacy of our mobile monitoring platform compared to that of
conventional monitoring devices like USRP GNU radios. Results indicating that
commoditized real-time spectrum monitoring is indeed
feasible in the near future. We conclude by presenting a set of open
challenges and potential directions for follow-up research.