Contemporary Study of Radio Noise Characteristics in Diverse Environments

We present results from the first phase of our measurement campaign designed to provide information on the current radio noise levels. Our focus is to understand if the increasing number of users and devices with inbuilt low-cost wireless transceivers has increased the noise levels considerably. We also study the stochastic properties of contemporary radio noise. In the literature, it is almost universally assumed that radio noise is well modeled by a white Gaussian stochastic process, and we study how often deviations from this baseline are found. Our measurement approach is able to capture frequencyand time-domain data with very high accuracy in diverse indoor and outdoor locations, providing a broad overview of the influence the environment has on noise and man-made interference. The results cast doubts on the widely used assumptions that consider man-made interference as an extra AWGN component over thermal noise floor. We also discuss the issue of modeling the measured radio noise and we explain the major research challenges for future work.