A Software Defined Radio-Based Prototype for Wireless Metrics Studies in IoT Applications

Abstract

The spectrum has always been an essential resource of information for wireless communications. With the continued growth of Internet of things (IoT) and 5G, there is a demand to understand how the spectrum is used. One of the challenges of deploying IoT applications is the crowded spectrum in the unlicensed industrial scientific medical bands leading to rising coexistence problems between different wireless protocols. To overcome this congestion, hardware tools supporting spectrum sensing can be used to manage the spectrum more efficiently. In this context, this work presents a prototype that measures a set wireless metrics on raw wireless signals acquired with software defined radio (SDR) technology. This prototype aims to provide mechanisms to sense and monitor spectrum usage that can mitigate one of the issues that IoT faces, the interference being produced by having different technologies using at the same frequency channels. The prototype features configurable radio frequency parameter and programmable periodical tasks execution. It displays wireless metrics such as signal to noise ratio, cumulative density function and power spectral density. This prototype uses web and SDR technologies, highlighting the idea and feasibility of combining these two technologies. In addition, it demonstrates the possibility to obtain wireless metrics with a low-cost hardware based on open source tools in a platform where interaction, debugging and maintaining becomes intuitive and easier. Results of measurements of LoRa protocol signals are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the prototype.