A Physical Testbed and Open Dataset for Passive Sensing and Wireless Communication Spectrum Coexistence

As next-generation communication services and satellite systems expand across diverse frequency bands, there is a pressing need to use the spectrum as efficiently as possible. A possible strategy to achieve this is to facilitate the coexistence of different radio services, for example between telecommunication and microwave remote sensing systems. However, this approach could increase the risk of radio frequency interference (RFI) affecting passive microwave sensors, which are crucial for environmental and geoscience applications. Therefore, the availability of a testbed along with a dataset encompassing a diverse array of scenarios under a controlled environment is very important in order to study coexistence scenarios and reduce the risk of interference associated with them. This study presents a physical environmentally controlled testbed including a passive fully calibrated L-band radiometer with a digital back-end capable of collecting raw in-phase/quadrature (IQ) samples and an active fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication system with the capability of transmitting waveforms with advanced modulations. Various RFI situations such as in-band, transition band, and out-of-band transmission effects are quantified in terms of their effect on the measured brightness temperature. A detailed procedure and publicly accessible dataset are provided to help test the impact of wireless communication on passive sensing, enabling the scientific community to facilitate coexistence research and quantify interference effects on radiometers. This dataset includes publicly available raw radiometer and 5G communication samples along with preprocessed time-frequency representations and true brightness temperature data.