Various Detection Techniques and Platforms for Monitoring Interference Condition in a Wireless Testbed

Recently the constant growth of the wireless communication technology has caused a huge demand for experimental facilities. Hence many research institutes setup public accessible experimental facilities, known as testbeds. Compared to the facilities developed by individual researchers, a testbed typically offers more resources, more flexibilities. However, due to the fact that equipments are located remotely and experiments involve more complex scenarios, the required complexity for analysis is also higher. A deep insight on the underlying wireless environment of the testbed becomes necessary for comprehensive analysis. In this paper, we present a framework and associated techniques for monitoring the wireless environment in a large scale wireless testbed. The framework utilizes most common resources in the testbed, such as WI-FI nodes, as well as some high-end software-defined radio platforms. Information from both physical layer and network layer are taken into account. We observe that feature detection is more sensitive than general energy detection for dedicated technologies, and distributed spectrum sensing can further improve the detection sensitivity. Such observations are applied to achieve better interference detection. The performance is mainly analyzed experimentally.