Widemonitor: Goals

Although there are spectrum monitoring systems on the market, Widemonitor presents a distinct approach to the regular system architectures:

• There is a need for thinner spatial resolution in spectrum monitoring, arising from the fact that communications, including area coverage at high frequencies, are making increasing spectrum/channel reuse resulting in smaller cells and a huge (and growing) amount of user devices per km2. This scenario requires a monitoring system providing spectrum probes that can be widely installed, in a narrow spatial grid, maintaining the system cost still compatible with regulation entities budgets.
• Collected measurements data should be persisted in a centralized system, providing features of data handling, tagging, querying, statistics and graph visualization enabling authorized users to study and analyze these measurements.
• Communication between probes and the centralized system should be both economical and safe.
• The remote management of devices, for operational purposes, support and maintenance must be simple and fluid.
• The measurement band should be as wide as possible, considering the bands from 30MHz to 6GHz (VHF, UHF and microwave), since it is these tracks that do provide the most relevant wireless broadcasts, and where the network monitoring with high narrow spatial resolution has advantage (especially for higher frequencies) to identify and measure signals that attenuate a lot with distance.
• Probes should be easy to install in a wide range of scenarios: urban, semi-urban or rural; with a monolithic installation logic; not dependent on the existence of utility power distribution and characteristics that minimize vandalism or theft.

The name Widemonitor is well revealing of the system concept since it suggests a wide-band monitoring, wide distribution of probes on a narrow spatial grid to cover large territories.