Binary Blind Identification of Wireless Transmission Technologies for Wide-Band Spectrum Monitoring

Spectrum monitoring is important to ensure the safe operation of mission critical systems as well as the satisfactory performance of non-critical applications over wireless. In this paper, we present a novel blind technology identification (BTI) approach that utilizes only binary representation of spectrum activities to identify transmission technologies that are present in the radio spectrum. Spectrum observations are modeled as Boolean OR mixtures on the underlying signal sources, and the binary independent component analysis technique is applied. Not only can we reveal the latent independent wireless technologies, but their transmission statistics and activities at each time slot can also be inferred. Evaluation results on both synthetic and real spectrum traces show that without any high-level features, the proposed methodology achieves high inference accuracy in noisy measurements.