Electrosense+: Crowdsourcing Radio Spectrum Decoding using IoT Receivers

Abstract

Web spectrum monitoring systems based on crowdsourcing have recently gained popularity. These systems are however limited to applications of interest for governamental organizations or telecom providers, and only provide aggregated information about spectrum statistics. The result is that there is a lack of interest for layman users to participate, which limits its widespread deployment. We present Electrosense+ which addresses this challenge and creates a general-purpose and open platform for spectrum monitoring using low-cost, embedded, and software-defined spectrum IoT sensors. Electrosense+ allows users to remotely decode specific parts of the radio spectrum. It builds on the centralized architecture of its predecessor, Electrosense, for controlling and monitoring the spectrum IoT sensors, but implements a real-time and peer-to-peer communication system for scalable spectrum data decoding. We propose different mechanisms to incentivize the participation of users for deploying new sensors and keep them operational in the Electrosense network. As a reward for the user, we propose an incentive accounting system based on virtual tokens to encourage the participants to host IoT sensors. We present the new Electrosense+ system architecture and evaluate its performance at decoding various wireless signals, including FM radio, AM radio, ADS-B, AIS, LTE, and ACARS.