LTE-CommSense system and its feasibility analysis

This paper describes a novel way to use the existing communication infrastructure of LTE (Long Term Evolution) to monitor the change in the environment along with its feasibility analysis. This system is named LTE-CommSense by the authors and can be used in many environment sensing objectives namely monitoring of crop growth over a period of time, disaster monitoring, sea state monitoring, snow avalanche monitoring, security of large unmanned landscapes etc. This technology focuses on already known information from received signal e.g. reference symbols in the LTE communication signal frames. In the equalizer block of the receiver, the equalizer tap coefficients gets modified while training the equalizer using reference symbols. These modifications depend on the channel through which the received signal has passed through. Therefore the adaptive equalizer tap coefficients contain information related to the channel condition. We propose to use these coefficients to get an estimate of change in the channel properties. LTE spectrum and infrastructure will be utilized to get channel characteristics without affecting the existing communication system. After the channel information is received, phenomenological knowledge about the environment will be obtained using ASIN (Application Specific INstrumentation) phylosophy. We present a feasibility analysis of the novel scheme in this paper. We used LTE specific channel models from ITU (International Telecommunication Union) with AWGN noise as the dataset and nearest neighbour based classifier to validate this scheme.