Battery-free Wideband Spectrum Mapping using Commodity RFID Tags

Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Swarun Kumar, Peter Steenkiste

Abstract: This paper introduces RFIMap, a system that aims to inexpensively characterize the spatial and temporal distribution of RF spectrum occupancy of any indoor space at fine granularity (tens of centimeters). RFIMap builds rich wide-band indoor spectrum occupancy maps using low-cost and battery-free commodity RFID tags. RFIMap's spectrum maps have wide-ranging applications such as monitoring ambient interference in smart manufacturing, and smart hospitals. RFIMap relies on the observation that commodity RFID tags naturally reflect ambient transmission at other frequency bands, without any modification. RFIMap uses these reflections to estimate the ambient signal power originally received at these tags. RFIMap further performs a careful modeling of indoor multipath to build a dense spectrum map with fine spatial granularity. Our experiments demonstrate spatial spectrum measurement with 2.15 dB of median error at 2.4 GHz, 4.45 dB of median error at 470-700 MHz TV whitespace band, 2.1 dB of median error at 1.8-1.9 GHz in diverse industrial and university settings.