Scaling Network-Based Spectrum Analyzer With Constant Communication Cost

The authors propose a spectrum analyzer that leverages many networked commodity sensor nodes, each of which samples its portion in a wideband spectrum. The sensors operate in parallel and transmit their measurements over a wireless network without performing any significant computations such as FFT. The measurements are forwarded to the backend of the system where spectrum analysis takes place. In particular, they propose a solution that compresses the raw measurements in a simple random linear projection and combines the compressed measurements from multiple sensors in-network. As a result, they achieve a substantial reduction in the network bandwidth requirement to operate the proposed system.