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 organizationsor telecom providers, and only provide aggregated information about spectrum statistics. Theresult is that there is a lack of interest for layman users to participate, which limits its widespreaddeployment. 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 ofthe radio spectrum. It builds on the centralized architecture of its predecessor, Electrosense, forcontrolling and monitoring the spectrum IoT sensors, but implements a real-time and peer-to-peercommunication system for scalable spectrum data decoding. We propose different mechanismsto incentivize the participation of users for deploying new sensors and keep them operational inthe Electrosense network. As a reward for the user, we propose an incentive accounting systembased on virtual tokens to encourage the participants to host IoT sensors. We present the newElectrosense+ system architecture and evaluate its performance at decoding various wireless sig-nals, including FM radio, AM radio, ADS-B, AIS, LTE, and ACARS.