Broadband Mapping Using Smartphones

Principal Investigator: Professor Monisha Ghosh, Department of Electrical Engineering

Project Summary: Smartphones today contain a large number of radio interfaces that support the various wireless connectivity modes that we use: Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, and cellular being the main ones. These radio interfaces support a number of frequency bands: the unlicensed 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands, and cellular bands in the low (< 1 GHz(, mid (1 – 6 GHz), and high (> 24 GHz) bands. Further, Android phones make available a number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow one to extract the signal measurements made by these radios: signal strength, signal quality, bandwidth and band of operation, etc. The PI has developed an app, SigCap, that extracts these measurements, exports them, and analyzes the resulting data. Please see https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~muhiqbalcr/sigcap/ for more details on SigCap and recent papers. In addition to SigCap, which is a passive app, speed test apps such as the FCC Speedtest app will be used to collect measurements on throughput and latency.

Next-generation wireless networks, both cellular (5G, CBRS) and Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6E) are evolving rapidly. However, there is insufficient data that can be used to rigorously analyze performance of deployed networks as opposed to theoretical prediction models. This project aims to build data sets that will be useful to the broader research community in understanding how current networks perform and use the results to guide the design and development of future networks.

Student’s Role: The student will use the app on a number of different smartphones to collect data around the Notre Dame campus on 5G, CBRS, and Wi-Fi networks. The data will then be curated, cleaned, and extracted into csv files for analysis of spectrum occupancy and usage in different bands. By the end of the project, the student will have gained knowledge of deployed wireless networks, pertinent measurements, and analysis of the collected data. Depending on student interest, there will also be an opportunity to add features to the app.