A novel clouds based spectrum monitoring approach for future monitoring network

With the rapid development of wireless technologies and rising demand for high speed multimedia applications, a variety of wireless communication networks have been deployed in the same geographic region to provide seamless services. The coexistence of these networks makes the electromagnetic spectrum environment extraordinary complex and irregular, thus bringing in great difficulty for spectrum monitoring. However, the existing monitoring mechanisms mainly concentrate on local monitoring issues, allowing individual stations to communicate and exchange data with each other to achieve ideal performance. In these mechanisms, the decision making of monitoring stations relies on the information transmitted by other stations. If the information is incorrect, the overall system performance will be affected. Moreover, the monitoring stations merely pay attention to a limited amount of data, with no consideration of massive data from global network, thus the decisions may be one-sidedness. To solve the global monitoring problem within time-varying environment and supervise the behavior of transmitting stations in an efficient way, a clouds based spectrum monitoring approach is proposed. The approach enables sensor nodes to directly transmit monitoring data to the clouds. And then it handles the multi-dimensional data with advanced cloud computing technique with great flexibility and extensibility. Simulation results show that the clouds based monitoring approach can greatly reduce the overhead of communication links than the traditional monitoring network.