Spectrum Patrolling with Crowdsourced Spectrum Sensors

We use a crowdsourcing approach for RF spectrum patrolling, where heterogeneous, low-cost spectrum sensors are deployed widely and are tasked with detecting unauthorized transmissions in a collaborative fashion while consuming only a limited amount of resources. We pose this as a collaborative signal detection problem where the individual sensor’s detection performance may vary widely based on their respective hardware or software configurations, but are hard to model using traditional approaches. Still an optimal subset of sensors and their configurations must be chosen to maximize the overall detection performance subject to given resource (cost) limitations. We present the challenges of this problem in crowdsourced settings and present a set of methods to address them. The proposed methods use data-driven approaches to model individual sensors and develops mechanisms for sensor selection and fusion while accounting for their correlated nature. We present performance results using examples of commodity-based spectrum sensors and show significant improvements relative to baseline approaches.