Crowdsourcing-based Spectrum Monitoring at A Large Geographical Scale

Abstract

Spectrum monitoring is a powerful tool in dynamic spectrum access to help secondary users access the unused spectrum white space. The common approach for spectrum monitoring is to build infrastructures (e.g. spectrum observatories), which cost much money and manpower but have relatively low coverage. To aid in this, we propose a crowdsourcing based spectrum monitoring system for a large geographical area that leverages the power of masses of portable mobile devices. The system can accurately predict future spectrum utilization and intelligently schedule the spectrum monitoring tasks among mobile secondary users accordingly, so that the energy of mobile devices can be saved and more spectrum activities can be monitored. We also demonstrate our system’s ability to capture not only the existing spectrum access patterns but also the unknown patterns where no historical spectrum information exist. The experiment shows that our spectrum monitoring system can obtain a high spectrum monitoring coverage and low energy consumption.