SpecSense: Crowdsensing for efficient querying of spectrum occupancy

We describe an end-to-end platform called SpecSense to support large scale spectrum monitoring. SpecSense crowdsources spectrum monitoring to low-cost, low-power commodity SDR/embedded platforms and provides necessary analytics support in a central spectrum server. In this work, we describe SpecSense and address specific challenges related to accurately estimate spectrum occupancy on demand with low overhead. To address the accuracy question, we augment state-of-the-art spatial interpolation techniques to accommodate scenarios where RF propagation characteristics change across space. To address the overhead question, we solve the sensor selection problem to select the minimum number of spectrum sensors that can best estimate the spectrum at the requested locations.