Radio-Signal Correlation for Collaborative Wideband Spectrum Monitoring System

Abstract

Today's spectrum measurements are mainly performed by governmental agencies which drive around using expensive specialized hardware. The idea of collaborative spectrum monitoring has recently gained attention to capture the usage of the wireless spectrum at larger geographical scale. We present in this report the main challenges address in collaborative spectrum monitoring and we propose a methodology for making decisions based on signal correlation similarity between sensors. To reach this goal, we build a software-defined sensor architecture that enables distributed data collection in real-time over Internet. Our sensor design builds upon low-cost commercial hardware components with a total cost per sensor device below $100. Our results suggest that our architecture can be useful to coordinate a large number of sensors scanning at the same or different frequencies in order to reach the target collaboratively. Interesting application areas could be dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radios, re-construct a large-bandwidth signals or simply to gain an understanding of the spectrum usage at large scale to detect elevated electro-smog regions, anomalies in the signals or set policy enforcement in the electromagnetic space.