Spectrum Sensing Everywhere: Wide-Band Spectrum Sensing With Low-Cost UWB Nodes

Spectrum sensing plays a crucial role in spectrum monitoring and management. However, due to the expensive cost of high-speed ADCs, wideband spectrum sensing is a long-standing challenge. In this paper, we present how to transform Ultra-wideband (UWB) devices into a spectrum sensor which can provide wideband spectrum monitoring at a low cost. Compared with the expensive high-speed ADCs which cost at least hundreds of dollars, a UWB device is only several dollars. As the low-cost UWB technology is not originally designed for spectrum sensing, we address the inherent limitations of low-cost devices such as limited memory, low SPI speed and low accuracy, and show how to obtain spectrum occupancy information from the noisy and spurious UWB channel impulse response. In this paper, we present WISE, which not only can give accurate channel occupancy information, but also can precisely estimate the signal power and bandwidth. WISE can also detect fleeting radar signals. We implement WISE and perform extensive evaluations with both controlled experiments and field tests. Results show that WISE can sense up to 900MHz bandwidth with frequency range from 0.5GHz to 7GHz, and the power estimation error is less than 3dB. WISE can also accurately detect busy 5G channels and can classify the encrypted traffic from the channel usage patterns. We believe that WISE provides a new paradigm for low-cost wideband spectrum sensing, which is critical for large-scale fine-grained spectrum monitoring.