Building a spectrum map for future cognitive radio technology

Monitoring the spectrum utilization and capturing the available spectrum bands is the groundwork for the Cognitive Radio (CR) technologies. Because the spectrum management has been a politically as well as a technically sensitive issue, it is usually very hard to access the open data of real spectrum usage. In this sense, we believe grass-roots data collections are important. For these collections to be worthy of spectrum investigations, we need to reduce several noises inserted during monitoring because of the diversity of measurement environments. In addition to this, data visualization must be provided end users with intuitive understanding about the results of the analysis. This paper presents the basic requirements for the data format of grass-roots spectrum data collections and the visualization process using Virtual Earth platform to be accessed from the public. We then show a prototype system named SpectrumMap to aim at visualizing location-based or time-based information of spectrum resources and promoting research on the future CR solutions with user-friendly interfaces. Integrating spectrum analyzer, GPS (Global Positioning System) and the Virtual Earth platform, a mashup of spectrum utilization in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) views is demonstrated for mobile as well as static environments.