Radio environment monitoring

Abstract

The high number of wireless devices available and the inherent relationship between electromagnetic wave propagation and the physical environment have made these devices and their network architectures ideal sources of information for noncommunication-related applications, such as home monitoring and heart beat detection. The number and significance of wireless sensing use-cases highlight the importance of a framework to acquire information on the radio environment. This chapter introduces such a framework, goes over relevant technologies, and provides a case study for environment sensing. The most well-studied area of radio environment map (REM) is perhaps the radio frequency map construction. The chapter provides this as an example for the working of the REM architecture. The generalized radio environment monitoring framework enables information gathering and radio and physical environment awareness, behaving as an independent entity capable of feeding information to other entities.