Empirical Validation of Commodity Spectrum Monitoring
Ana Nika
Zhijing Li
Yanzi Zhu
Yibo Zhu
Ben Y. Zhao
Xia Zhou
Haitao Zheng
Proceedings of 14th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2016)
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Paper Abstract
We describe our efforts to empirically validate a distributed spectrum
monitoring system built on commodity smartphones and embedded low-cost
spectrum sensors. This system enables real-time spectrum sensing,
identifies and locates active transmitters, and generates alarm events
when detecting anomalous transmitters. To evaluate the feasibility of
such a platform, we perform detailed experiments using a prototype
hardware platform using smartphones and RTL dongles. We identify
multiple sources of error in the sensing results and the end-user
overhead (i.e. smartphone energy draw). We propose and implement a
variety of techniques to identify and overcome errors and uncertainty
in the data, and to reduce energy consumption. Our work demonstrates the
basic viability of user-driven spectrum monitoring on commodity devices.