Distributed Spectrum Sensing Using Low Cost Hardware

A distributed spectrum sensing network is prototyped using off the shelf hardware consisting of Raspberry Pi mini-computers and DVB-T receivers with software defined radio capabilities. Using the prototype network, coordinated, distributed wideband spectrum sensing is performed in a geographical area. The spectrum sensing data from the nodes is collected in a database. Well established low-complexity algorithms for distributed spectrum sensing are applied, and the results are compared against a professional spectrum sensing system. We show that with this simple low-cost setup, the decisions made on the availability of spectrum using the distributed sensing data correspond well with the decisions made on the reference data.