Experimental Evidence for Heavy Tailed Interference in the IoT

5G and beyond sees an ever increasing density of connected things. As not all devices are coordinated, there are limited opportunities to mitigate interference. As such, it is crucial to characterize the interference in order to understand its impact on coding, waveform and receiver design. While a number of theoretical models have been developed for the interference statistics in communications for the IoT, there is very little experimental validation. In this letter, we address this key gap in understanding by performing statistical analysis on recent measurements in the unlicensed 863 MHz to 870 MHz band in different regions of Aalborg, Denmark. In particular, we show that the measurement data suggests the distribution of the interference power is heavy tailed, confirming predictions from theoretical models.