SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETECTING RF TRANSMISSIONS IN FREQUENCY BANDS OF INTEREST ACROSS A GEOGRAPHIC AREA

• US 20110185059A1
• Filed: 01/26/2011
• Published: 07/28/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 01/28/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: ThinkRF Corporation
• Original Assignee: ThinkRF Corporation
• Inventors: Adnani, Nikhil, Hember, Tim
• Granted Patent: US 8,886,794 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/224
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 24/08 Testing, supervising or monitoring using real traffic
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 84/12 WLAN [Wireless Local Area Networks]
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 84/18 Self-organising networks, e.g. ad-hoc networks or sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless devices form a significant portion of equipment forming the source/destination of content transmitted over telecommunications infrastructure together with applications such as RF identification, smart tags, etc. As such the wireless spectrum supports these devices operating to multiple standards, both licensed and unlicensed. In many environments it would be beneficial for a network administrator to know whether the environment and network they are responsible for is compliant to policies established in dependence of the environment/network. The invention provides distributed wireless signal analyzers within the environment/network to provide signal/spectrum analysis and determine whether received signals by the wireless signal analyzer are compliant to the network administrator policy. Compliance may be based upon time or frequency domain measurements with different rules for different wireless spectrum regions. Non-compliance is communicated to remote servers and/or network administrator and allows local control of network equipment.

Claims

1. A network comprising:

at least one signal analyzer of a plurality of signal analyzers, each signal analyzer associated with a predetermined location and for providing signal analysis of at least one user-specified frequency band of a plurality of user-specified frequency bands to determine whether signals by the at least one signal analyzer within the at least one user-specified frequency band comply with at least a user-defined policy of a plurality of user-defined policies; and

at least one server of a plurality of servers, each server in communication with a predetermined subset of the plurality of signal analyzers to receive a trigger signal from a signal analyzer within the predetermined subset when spectral analysis denotes a predetermined condition with respect to compliance of received signal to the at least one user-defined policy.

2. A network according to claim 1 wherein;

when at least two signal analyzers are associated with the same predetermined location they are operated so as to provide spectral analysis of at least one of non-overlapping and partially overlapping user-specified frequency bands.

3. A network according to claim 1 wherein;

a predetermined portion of the plurality of signal analyzers are synchronized in respect of at least one of user-defined frequency band and sampling clock, the sampling clock being employed within a predetermined portion of the spectral analysis portion of a signal analyzer.

4. A network according to claim 1 wherein;

at least one of the signal analysis and the at least one user-defined policy relate to at least one of a time domain and a frequency domain.

5. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

at least one of data relating to the at least one user-specified frequency band and at least one user-defined policy are communicated to the at least one signal analyzer from at least one of the at least one server and a network administration application, the network administration application in communication with at least one of the at least one server and the at least one signal analyzer.

6. A network according to claim 5 wherein,

the data comprises information relating to at least an aspect of the signal analysis, the aspect selected from the group comprising a time interval to monitor the at least one user-specified frequency band, a lower frequency for the at least one user-specified frequency band, an upper frequency for the at least one user-specified frequency band, a gain to be applied to received signals for analysis, a length of a Fast-Fourier transform process to be applied to digitized data generated from received signals, a frequency within the at least one user-defined policy, a power associated with a frequency within the at least one user-defined policy, and a control value for controlling combination of data within the at least one user-defined policy.

7. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the at least one signal analyzer provides spectral analysis of the at least one user-specified frequency band at least one of periodically as the signal analyzer cycles through the plurality of user-specified frequency bands, at a predetermined time of day, and upon receipt of a control signal from at least one of the at least one server and a network administration application.

8. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

compliance of the received signal to the at least one user-defined policy is determined when a measure of the received signal at least one of exceeds, falls below, or falls between predefined levels, the predefined levels being established by the at least one user-defined policy.

9. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

when the at least one user-defined policy contains a predetermined term to establish the policy for a frequency within the at least one user-defined frequency band that frequency result shall not be used in determining compliance to the at least one user-defined policy.

10. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the least one user-defined policy contains data to establish whether the received signals are compliant to the at least one user-defined policy, the data relating to at least a predetermined portion of each user-defined frequency band of the plurality of user-defined frequency bands.

11. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the trigger signal is generated by the at least one signal analyzer upon failure of at least a single measurement performed on the received signals within the at least one user-defined frequency band to meet the conditions established by the at least one user-defined policy.

12. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the trigger signal is generated by the at least one signal analyzer upon failure of a statistical analysis performed upon measurements performed on the received signals within the at least one user-defined frequency band to meet the conditions established by the at least one user-defined policy, the statistical analysis performed upon a predetermined number of measurements relating to at least one predetermined frequency within the at least user-defined frequency band.

13. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the trigger signal comprises at least one of a predetermined portion of the measurements performed by the signal analyzer, a predetermined number of measurements relating to the received signals failing compliance to the at least one user-specified policy, a time stamp, an identity of the signal analyzer, and data relating to a corrective action performed by an element of a wireless network the signal analyzer is analyzing signals from.

14. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the trigger signal comprises information relating to received signals not complying with the at least one user-defined policy, the information being at least one of time-domain data, digitized in-phase baseband signal data, digitized quadrature baseband signal data, frequency domain data, absolute value Fast-Fourier Transform data, complex Fast-Fourier Transform data, processed digitized in-phase baseband data and processed digitized quadrature baseband data.

15. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the trigger signal comprises at least one of processed time domain data and time domain data for processing by at least one of the at least one server and a network administration application.

16. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

if spectral analysis upon the at least one user-defined frequency band determines compliance to the at least one user-defined policy then at least one of no data is transmitted to at least one server and a message to the at least one server to indicate a status of at least one of the signal analyzer and the communication link between the signal analyzer and the at least one server.

17. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the signal analyzer performs signal processing upon the received signals prior to at least one of determining compliance to the at least one user-defined policy and generating the trigger signal comprising at least a predetermined portion of the processed received signals.

18. A network according to claim 1 wherein,

the signal processing comprises at least one of digitizing, identifying, demodulating, frequency down-converting, applying a mathematical process, filtering, amplifying, and attenuating.