Detailed Measurement Study of Spatial Similarity in Spectrum Use in Dense Urban Environments

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We present a detailed analysis of spectrum use and radio environment dynamics based on extensive measurement campaigns in the two European metropolitan areas of Paris and London. Our focus is twofold. First, for the Paris case we focus on frequency bands assigned to cellular systems. In particular, we present extensive cross-correlational analyses describing the complex interdependencies in spectrum use between the various bands, together with their spatial correlation structures. Our results show that there are strong correlations in many instances, but these are not present in all regions and for all technologies. Second, we focus on characterizing the variability in spectrum use using novel methodology going beyond the classical spatial correlation analysis. For this, we carry out detailed measurements over different areas of London, using both moving measurement platforms as well as a stationary reference. The utilized measurement approach allows us to study the scales of variation in an area, which are important for secondary access systems and cognitive network types of deployments that have to understand and exploit those. Such deployments depend on various boundary conditions on the radio dynamics. Our major methodological contribution is that we do not only use a local average with the simplest spatial dependency measure (linear correlation), but we retain all the data and quantify spatial similarly using distribution-wide metrics. This approach also allows us to question how much information can indeed be shared from relay nodes or single nodes measurements that try to capture dynamics of larger operating regions.