Spectrum Monitoring and Analysis in Urban and Rural Environments at Different Altitudes

TL;DR

This study investigates how altitude affects spectrum occupancy in urban and rural environments at altitudes up to 180 meters, revealing increased power levels with altitude and providing SigMF-compliant datasets for bands between 100 MHz and 6 GHz.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed analysis of altitude's impact on spectrum measurement in diverse environments and offers comprehensive datasets for future research.

Findings

Power levels generally increase with altitude due to better line-of-sight links.

Urban and rural environments show different spectrum occupancy patterns.

Datasets covering 100 MHz to 6 GHz are provided for further analysis.

Abstract

Due to the scarcity of spectrum resources, the emergence of new technologies and ever-increasing number of wireless devices operating in the radio frequency spectrum lead to data congestion and interference. In this work, we study the effect of altitude on sub-6 GHz spectrum measurement results obtained at a Helikite flying over two distinct scenarios; i.e., urban and rural environments. Specifically, we aim at investigating the spectrum occupancy of various long-term evolution (LTE), $5^{\text{th}}$ generation (5G) and citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) bands utilized in the United States for both uplink and downlink at altitudes up to 180 meters. Our results reveal that generally the mean value of the measured power increases as the altitude increases where the line-of-sight links with nearby base stations is more available. SigMF-compliant spectrum measurement datasets used in this paper covering all the bands between 100~MHz to 6~GHz are also provided.