7.2SPMar 17
Evaluating Smartphone GNSS Accuracy for Geofenced 6 GHz OperationsJoshua Roy Palathinkal, Hardani Ismu Nabil, Muhammad Iqbal Rochman et al.
The recently deployed 6 GHz spectrum in the U.S. utilizes distinct power categories, with the latest proposed "Geofenced Variable Power" (GVP) category permitting indoor and outdoor operations without continuous Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) by relying instead on local databases of exclusion zones. Consequently, the safe operation of GVP devices depends entirely on reliable GNSS localization to respect these geofences. However, GNSS accuracy is highly variable and significantly degrades in environments like urban canyons or indoors. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study evaluating GNSS reliability specifically for GVP compliance. Utilizing the SigCap Android application, we document and compare GNSS accuracy across an extensive array of real-world conditions, encompassing urban versus suburban landscapes, varying mobility states (stationary, walking, driving), and indoor versus outdoor settings. The results demonstrate that while device hardware causes variations in GNSS accuracy, the operational environment is the primary driver of error. Indoor settings and dense urban areas consistently degrade localization. Moreover, outdoor positions adjacent to buildings often surprisingly produce significant inaccuracies, even near low-elevation structures. We further analyze the contribution of different GNSS constellations to device positioning and show that satellites from non-U.S.-licensed constellations-although currently used in a substantial portion of location fixes-are not permitted for regulatory geolocation under FCC requirements.
Data Driven Environmental Awareness Using Wireless SignalsHossein Nasiri, Seda Dogan-Tusha, Muhammad Iqbal Rochman et al.
Robust classification of the operational environment of wireless devices is becoming increasingly important for wireless network optimization, particularly in a shared spectrum environment. Distinguishing between indoor and outdoor devices can enhance reliability and improve coexistence with existing, outdoor, incumbents. For instance, the unlicensed but shared 6 GHz band (5.925 - 7.125 GHz) enables sharing by imposing lower transmit power for indoor unlicensed devices and a spectrum coordination requirement for outdoor devices. Further, indoor devices are prohibited from using battery power, external antennas, and weatherization to prevent outdoor operations. As these rules may be circumvented, we propose a robust indoor/outdoor classification method by leveraging the fact that the radio-frequency environment faced by a device are quite different indoors and outdoors. We first collect signal strength data from all cellular and Wi-Fi bands that can be received by a smartphone in various environments (indoor interior, indoor near windows, and outdoors), along with GPS accuracy, and then evaluate three machine learning (ML) methods: deep neural network (DNN), decision tree, and random forest to perform classification into these three categories. Our results indicate that the DNN model performs the best, particularly in minimizing the most important classification error, that of classifying outdoor devices as indoor interior devices.
2.3NIMar 18, 2020
Machine Learning enabled Spectrum Sharing in Dense LTE-U/Wi-Fi Coexistence ScenariosAdam Dziedzic, Vanlin Sathya, Muhammad Iqbal Rochman et al.
The application of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to complex engineering problems has proved to be an attractive and efficient solution. ML has been successfully applied to several practical tasks like image recognition, automating industrial operations, etc. The promise of ML techniques in solving non-linear problems influenced this work which aims to apply known ML techniques and develop new ones for wireless spectrum sharing between Wi-Fi and LTE in the unlicensed spectrum. In this work, we focus on the LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) specification developed by the LTE-U Forum, which uses the duty-cycle approach for fair coexistence. The specification suggests reducing the duty cycle at the LTE-U base-station (BS) when the number of co-channel Wi-Fi basic service sets (BSSs) increases from one to two or more. However, without decoding the Wi-Fi packets, detecting the number of Wi-Fi BSSs operating on the channel in real-time is a challenging problem. In this work, we demonstrate a novel ML-based approach which solves this problem by using energy values observed during the LTE-U OFF duration. It is relatively straightforward to observe only the energy values during the LTE-U BS OFF time compared to decoding the entire Wi-Fi packet, which would require a full Wi-Fi receiver at the LTE-U base-station. We implement and validate the proposed ML-based approach by real-time experiments and demonstrate that there exist distinct patterns between the energy distributions between one and many Wi-Fi AP transmissions. The proposed ML-based approach results in a higher accuracy (close to 99\% in all cases) as compared to the existing auto-correlation (AC) and energy detection (ED) approaches.