CommSense: a communication infrastructure based sensing instrument for environment monitoring

The proposed work describes a novel way to use the existing communication infrastructure based sensing to monitor the change in the environment (CommSense). The key idea to this technology lies in focusing on already known information from received signal e.g. Pilot carriers in the communication signal frames. Comparing the received signal with the expected properties of the pilot, we can get an estimate of change in the environment based on change in channel properties. Existing Long Term Evolution telecommunication infrastructure is utilized for this environment sensing task. After the channel characteristics are estimated, those can be used to obtain phenomenological knowledge of the environment using Application Specific INstrumentation framework. This system was implemented using software defined radio platform and GNURadio software support.