Collaborative Research: EARS: Crowd-based Spectrum Monitoring and Enforcement

Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Investigators

Abstract

The scientists identify an important issue for a world of devices all communicating wirelessly: "How to identify malfunctioning devices or those not fairly sharing the spectrum with others?" The scientists explore scenarios for leveraging local, crowd-sourced mobile devices to detect and identify unauthorized transmitters. The goal of this technique is to reduce the cost of enforcement of network rules by adding the capability of some smart phones to sense the radio spectrum use and report back to a central database. The PIs propose to develop a Crowd-based Spectrum ENforcement System (CSENS), which takes a data-driven approach to spectrum enforcement. Specifically, the PIs propose to conduct 3 tasks: (i) real-time on-demand spectrum monitoring, which enables real-time responses to spectrum measurement tasks; (ii) utilizing physical layer features to embed cryptographic spectrum permits into transmissions, which enables reliably distinguish between authorized and unauthorized spectrum users; (iii) using a library of known signatures for network applications, unauthorized transmitters can be uniquely identified.