A Compressed-Sensing System for Radio Spectrum Monitoring and Localization of Noncooperative Sources

This article presents a prototype system for the monitoring of radio frequency (RF) emissions and their localization. The system is composed of a network of RF spectrum measurement nodes and a command and control center (CCC) which is in charge of collecting the sensed data (i.e., the RF field signature) by the measurement nodes. To reduce the amount of data sent by each measurement node toward the CCC, a compressed-sensing-based algorithm is implemented for this task. A description of: 1) the architecture of the realized distributed measurement system; 2) the hardware implementation of the RF spectrum measurement nodes; and 3) the CCC is given. Evaluation tests that were carried out in laboratory and on-field environments will also be presented showing the capability of the system of online detecting and localizing noncooperative RF emitters.