Abstract
RF spectrum is a limited natural resource under a significant demand and thus must be effectively monitored and protected. Recently, there has been a significant interest in the use of inexpensive commodity-grade spectrum sensors for large-scale RF spectrum monitoring. The spectrum sensors are attached to compute devices for signal processing computation and also network and storage support. However, these compute devices have limited computation power that impacts the sensing performance adversely. Thus, the parameter choices for the best performance must be done carefully taking the hardware limitations into account. In this paper, we demonstrate this using a benchmarking study, where we consider the detection an unauthorized transmitter that transmits intermittently only for very small durations (micro-transmissions). We characterize the impact of device hardware and critical sensing parameters such as sampling rate, integration size and frequency resolution in detecting such transmissions. We find that in our setup we cannot detect more than 45% of such micro-transmissions on these inexpensive spectrum sensors even with the best possible parameter setting. We explore use of multiple sensors and sensor fusion as an effective means to counter this problem.
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- 1.
We use the term spectrum sensor as sensor and compute device together.
- 2.
I refers to the in phase component of the signal and Q refers to the quadrature component of the signal. I and Q representation of a signal contains information about the amplitude as well as the phase of the signal. The received IQ samples are used to reconstruct the received signal which is later demodulated to extract the message signal.
- 3.
Note that RTL-SDR has detection ratio similar USRP when the received signal power is high. RTL-SDR performs poorly when the transmitter gain is very low and signal power is close to noise floor (See Sect. 3.3).
- 4.
Note that it is well known that signal power deteriorates as the transmitter decreases its gain. The goal of this experiment is to understand the significance of detecting micro-transmissions under poor capabilities.
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Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by NSF grant CNS-1642965 and a grant from MSIT, Korea under the ICTCCP Program (IITP-2017-R0346-16-1007).
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Dasari, M., Atique, M.B., Bhattacharya, A., Das, S.R. (2019). Spectrum Protection from Micro-transmissions Using Distributed Spectrum Patrolling. In: Choffnes, D., Barcellos, M. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_16
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