Received June 30, 2021, accepted July 21, 2021, date of publication July 27, 2021, date of current

version August 6, 2021.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3100773

Electro-Smog Monitoring Using Low-Cost

Software-Defined Radio Dongles
YASSINE BEN-ABOUD 1,2 , MOUNIR GHOGHO1,3 , (Fellow, IEEE), SOFIE POLLIN 4, (Senior Member, IEEE),
AND ABDELLATIF KOBBANE2 , (Senior Member, IEEE)
1 TICLab, College of Engineering & Architecture, International University of Rabat, Rabat 11103, Morocco
2 ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Rabat 10000, Morocco
3 Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, U.K.
4 Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

Corresponding author: Yassine Ben-Aboud (yassine.benaboud@gmail.com)

This work was supported in part by Belgium Ministry of Cooperation through the Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad - Universitaire
Ontwikkelingssamenwerking (VLIR-UOS) Program by the MoreAir Project under Grant MA2017TEA446A101.

ABSTRACT With the increasing use of wireless communication technologies, it is important to monitor
electromagnetic exposure (ideally with high temporal and spatial resolutions). In this paper, we explore the
use of low-cost software-defined radio dongle for electro-smog measurements and more specifically for
electro-magnetic fields power measurements and the estimation of the incident power density. We describe
how the raw data is collected and then compute the average electromagnetic field power. We then compensate
for the non-linearity of the amplifier and the antenna gain to get the corrected electromagnetic field power
measurements. We use these measurements to estimate the incident power density which is the metric that
we use to evaluate the electro-smog. The results show that the considered low-cost SDR dongle is stable and
provides good quality power measurements. The estimation of the incident power density is shown to be
accurate enough for monitoring the electro-smog.

INDEX TERMS Electro-smog, Internet of Things, low-cost sensors, sensor systems, signal processing.

I. INTRODUCTION to continuously monitor them and study their evolution, espe-

Electro-Smog (or electro-magnetic pollution) refers to all cially in urban areas.
man-made electromagnetic radiation present in our sur- A wide range of studies has been carried out to quantify
rounding environment. According to the International Com- electro-smog exposure. In [16], Sorgucu et al. used a Spec-
mission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), tran HF-6065 EMF meter to collect electro-smog levels at
electromagnetic pollution is increasing due to the fast and 80 points in Erciyes University (Turkey). They found that the
continuous development and deployment of new wireless highest measured exposure was around 2.5% of the ICNIRP
technologies [1]. Thus it is important to monitor its growth. limit.
Many studies have been conducted to investigate the Similarly in [17], Tuysuz et al. used a calibrated EMF
effects of EMF exposure on health. The studies are divided meter (Narda SRM-3006) on a larger scale. They collected
between the ones that reported evidence of adverse health 155 measurements at 43 different locations near GSM sta-
effects (e.g. [2]–[7]) and the ones that show insignificant or tions during November 2014 in Rize city, Turkey. They estab-
no health effects (e.g. [5], [8]–[13]). In [14], Leach et al. pre- lished an electro-magnetic pollution map for the city and
sented a novel database of 1485 peer-reviewed studies show- showed that The ICNIRP limits were respected in most of
ing bio-effects from non-ionizing radiations. A summary of the city. But numerous hot-spots were detected, especially in
relevant studies is reported by the Scientific Committee on buildings that are not respecting the required safety distance
Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) to the GSM towers. Another similar work is presented in [18]
in [15]. While there is still no consensus on whether or not where Dhami et al. collected measurements in the city of
typical EMF radiations cause health hazards, it is important Chandigarh, India. They also showed that all measurements
report exposure levels below the ICNIRP limits. Other studies
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and explored the use of the personal electromagnetic field mon-
approving it for publication was Chin-Feng Lai . itor (or personal exposimeter of PEMs) for accurate EMF
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
VOLUME 9, 2021 For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 107149

exposure measurements. In [19], Miguel-Bilbao et al. present
a protocol to provide measurements of electro-smog, avoid-
ing the uncertainties associated with the use of PEMs thus
improving their use. Similarly, Gryz et al. analyze in [20] the
effect of the human body on the measurements of wearable
PEMs and the role of their location in accurately assessing
the electro-smog.
In the literature, a practical and widely used metric for
EMF exposure is the incident power density (W /m2 ), which
is usually measured using EMF meters [21]. The ICNIRP [1]
uses this metric to evaluate their basic restrictions, namely the
whole-body average specific energy absorption rate (SAR),
the local SAR (100 kHz to 6 GHz), the local specific energy
absorption (SA) (400 MHz to 6 GHz), and the local absorbed
energy density (6 GHz to 300 GHz). In [4], Kundi et al. used
the same metric in their study and concluded that an incident
power density around 0.5–1 mW /m2 must be exceeded to
observe long-term health effects. The wide use of this metric
suggests that it is a reliable metric for assessing the electro-
smog. We have therefore based our work on this metric.
The use of a high-end calibrated EMF-meter guarantees the
accuracy of the collected data. However, good EMF meters
cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars making their
large-scale deployment very expensive. Another approach is
the use of low-cost sensors, trading off some of the accuracies
for a high density of sensors which allows for a higher spatial
resolution/coverage.
The software-defined radio dongles are continuously gain-
ing in popularity. They cost as low as 20$ with the ability to
scan up to 1700MHz for the low-end ones, and up to 6GHz
for the more sophisticated ones. An example of studies done
with these dongles is presented in [22], where Rahman et al.
explored the use of the cheap RTL-SDR dongles as spec-
trum analyzers. They highlighted the advantages of using
these devices (cost-effectiveness, portability. . . ). Their results
show that the RTL-SDR dongles are a promising low-cost
candidate for these kinds of applications. A similar study
is presented in [23], [24]. A notable case study on the
use of these dongles is the Electrosense project [25]. It is
a crowd-sourcing spectrum monitoring platform using the
cheap RTL-SDR dongle to monitor a wide spectrum of fre-
quencies to ensure spectrum equality. In Electrosense+ [26],
its successor, Calvo-Palomino et al. uses the centralized
architecture of the Electrosense platform and builds a real-
time peer-to-peer communication system for scalable spec-
trum data decoding. The authors also introduce a reward
system to encourage people to host the Electrosense+ IoT
sensors. These two projects highlight the potential of using
the cheap RTL-SDR for large-scale deployments.
As part of the MoreAir Project [27] where we focus on
the use of low-cost sensors to assess and understand pol-
lution in urban areas. We describe in this paper how we
quantify the electro-smog in terms of incident power density
using a low-cost SDR dongle. Our work is motivated by the
promising results of [28] where Reynders et al. presented an
evaluation of the low-cost RTL-SDR dongle as an alternative
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Y. Ben-Aboud et al.: Electro-Smog Monitoring Using Low-Cost SDR Dongles
FIGURE 1. RTL-SDR RTL2832UDVB-T tuner dongle.
to the expensive EMF-meters for EMF power measurement.
The authors demonstrated that the amplifier of the RTL-SDR
is not linear. This non-linearity should be accounted for and
corrected. The goal of our paper is to further evaluate the
RTL-SDR as an EMF power data sensor and then use it to
estimate the incident power density.
In Section II, we describe the EMF power measure-
ment process followed by the electro-smog estimation. This
includes the hardware selection, the EMF power correction,
and reference level estimation. In Section III, we present
the results of our experimental evaluations. Conclusions and
future directions are presented in Section IV.
II. MEASUREMENT METHOD
In this section, we describe our measurement process.
We start with a brief description of the sensing unit, followed
by how the EMF power is measured and corrected. Finally,
we describe how the incident power density is estimated.
A. SENSING UNIT
The main component of our system is the Software Defined
Radio (SDR) (Fig. 1). We use the RTL-SDR RTL2832U
DVB-T Tuner Dongle [29]. In addition to its low price,
it allows us to collect power measurements for frequencies
ranging from 24MHz up to 1766MHz, with sampling rates
up to 3.2MS/s (Mega Samples per second), thus offering a
good trade-off between accessibility and bandwidth.
In order for the RTL-SDR to convert the signal into power
measurements, It uses an RT820 Tuner and an RTL2832U
chip. For a desired central frequency, the tuner chip produces
an intermediate frequency (IF) 4-6 MHz signal. The IF sig-
nal is fed to the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) of the
RTL2832U chip where it is sampled at 28 MHz. The resulting
signal is digitally mixed with a locally generated 5 MHz
signal, with phases of 0 and 90 degrees (quadrature mixer).
The mixed signals are low-pass filtered with two cascaded
filters (with a combined cutoff frequency of 1.2 MHz) and
down-sampled to a configurable sample rate (up to 3.2MS/s).
The resulting signal is digitized and the resulting IQ sam-
ples are then sent to the PC via a USB link (Fig. 2). Note
that another popular RTL-SDR dongles’ design uses the
E4000 tuner chip instead of the RT820; the main difference is
that the quadrature mixer is on the tuner chip (analog) instead
of the RTL2832U chip.
B. POWER MEASUREMENT
The RTL-SDR dongle provides the information about the
EMF signal in a set of In-phase quadrature (IQ) samples
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FIGURE 2. SDR dongle breakdown (144-146 MHz example) [31].

FIGURE 3. Experiment setup 1 - EMF power source directly linked to the

RTL-SDR.

(complex form). To be able to estimate the incident power FIGURE 4. Effect of the warm-up process of the RTL-SDR.
density, a measurement of the EMF power is necessary. Let
Xf = {xf ,i }i∈[1,N ] be the set of samples collected for central
frequency f , with N being the number of samples. Equa-
tion (1) describes how the average power P̄f is measured (in
Watts):
N
1 X |xf ,i |2
P̄f = (1)
2N Z
i=1

where Z is the system’s input impedance (50 in the case

of the RTL-SDR dongles). Throughout this paper, the power
is averaged over a duration 0.1ms. The RTL-SDR dongle
requires a warm-up period of around 15 minutes before pro-
viding consistent data. To demonstrate this, we plugged a
cold RTL-SDR dongle directly into an Aaronia BPSG RF
generator using a cable, to eliminate antennas-induced noise
(se Fig. 3). We then used Python with pyrtlsdr library to
extract and process the IQ samples from the RTL-SDR.
To show the warm-up effect, We generate a −30dBm
continuous wave at 900MHz and take 40000 power measure-
ments using the cold RTL-SDR to capture the impact the
warm-up process has on the measurements. The measure-
ments (Fig. 4) show that this step alone reduces the error
by up to 2dBm for −30dBm signals. Thus, all the RTL-SDR
measurements in this paper will be collected after the warm-
up period.
The EMF power measurement provided by the RTL-SDR
dongle P̄f is a function of the real EMF power which is the
quantity that we are interested in, the RF gain, and the antenna
gain. We will next investigate these parameters and how they
can be corrected P̄f to estimate the real EMF Power.
1) AMPLIFIER NON LINEARITY
The RTL-SDR dongle offers the possibility of setting dif-
ferent values of the RF-gain. However, as demonstrated by
Reynders et al. in [28], the power measured by the RTL-SDR
does not vary linearly with the RF gain setting. To show
this, we used the setup in fig. 3. We generate a continuous
FIGURE 5. Visualization of the amplifier non linearity.
wave of −30dBm at 900MHz and collected data with different
RF gain settings (denoted by gRF ). By subtracting the RF
gain from the measured EMF power, the EMF power should
normally be equal to that of the originally generated wave
(i.e. −30dmb). However, our experiment shows that a signif-
icant offset is present as shown in Fig. 5, which depicts the
collected average power measurements (P̄f ) and the power
measurements after subtracting the RF gain (P̄f −gRF ) versus
the reference generated signal power(−30dBm).
With a linear amplifier, P̄f − gRF should be reduced to the
original −30dBm power. However, the difference is signifi-
cant and must be accounted for.
We followed a similar procedure to that of
Reynders et al. in [28]. For a given frequency and RF gain
setting, we compute the difference between the expected dif-
ference P̄f −gRF (which is equal to the power of the generated
signal, i.e. −30 dBm) and the power measured using the
dongle. we repeat this process 100 times. This experiment
was done over frequencies ranging from 400 to 1000 MHz.

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FIGURE 6. Power offset over different RF gain settings. FIGURE 7. Power offset variation per received power.

We then associate the measured average difference to the the electro-smog (in Urban areas, EMF radiations are gen-
corresponding frequency and RF gain setting. We define erated from different sources). For every frequency, two runs
O = {og }g∈[0,50] as the set of values mapping the set of RF of measurements were taken and averaged. Fig. 8a shows two
Gains (0 to 50 dB) to their associated power offsets (shown runs of measurements of the frequency response, and fig. 8b
in fig. 6). shows the estimated antenna gain.
This offset is power-dependent, meaning that it varies We apply a centered moving average (equation (3)) to
depending on the received power. We verified this by repeat- filter out the outliers and use the smoothed result as our
ing the same experiment with different generated EMF pow- frequency-gain map Ĝ, given by
ers and compare the resulting offsets. Fig. 7 shows that indeed  Pf +w
j=f −w φ̂j

the offset per RF gain differs between different received
Ĝ = (3)
power values, but the differences are in the order of 1dBm; w f ∈F
hence, the average of these offsets is used to associate each
where w is the moving average filter’s window size. 9)
RF gain setting to a power offset (power offset mapping) to
correct the amplifier non-linearity.
3) POWER CORRECTION
2) ANTENNA GAIN ESTIMATION
Using the Friis Equation [32], we model the received power
Pf as a function of the transmitter power Pt,f , the gains
Antennas with different designs resonate differently with
of the transmitter and receiver (φt,f and φf respectively),
each frequency thus affecting the conversion efficiency of the
the frequency f , and the distance between transmitter and
EMF waves into electrical power which translates into differ-
receiver d as shown in equation (4)
ent power measurements. The antenna gain determines the
2
efficiency of this process and is thus another factor that influ-

c
ences the received power measurement. Correctly estimating Pf = Pt,f φt,f φf (4)
4πdf
the antenna gain is thus crucial because it is used to correct
the EMF power, and to estimate the incident power density In our application, we have multiple transmitters at dif-
through the estimation of the effective area. To keep the cost ferent distances and with different transmission powers and
of the sensor low, we used a low-cost dipole antenna. Let antenna gains. Let M be the number of transmitters and T =
F = [300 MHz, 2600 MHz] denote the range of frequencies {Ti }i∈[1,M ] the set of transmitters. Each transmitter Ti has a
of interest (the majority of low-cost SDR dongles’ frequency transmission power PTi ,f , antenna gain φTi ,f , and a distance
bands fall within this range). For this purpose, We measure dTi to the receiver. The total received power is then expressed
the frequency response of the antenna at different frequencies as
(denoted ρf ) from which we estimate the antenna gain φ̂f over XM 
c
2
the range of frequencies F. Pf = φf PTi ,f φTi ,f (5)
4πdTi f
i=1
8̂ = φ̂f = 10 log10 (ginit ∗ (1 − |ρf |2 )) f ∈F

(2)
We are interested in measuring the total EMF power at
where ginit is the initial gain (gain of a lossless dipole the location of the receiving antenna represented by PT ,f =
PM
2
i=1 PTi ,f φTi ,f 4πdTi f . In other words, it is the total power
c
antenna). We did not include the antenna angle as a parameter
in the gain estimation because of the multi-source nature of that a human located at the receiving antenna will be exposed

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FIGURE 8. Antenna measurements and gain estimations.

FIGURE 9. Antenna gain mapping.

FIGURE 10. EMF exposure estimation method.

to. Working with decibels, the received measurement can be
expressed as C. INCIDENT POWER DENSITY ESTIMATION
After correcting the EMF power measurement, we focus
(Pf )dB = (φf )dB + (PT ,f )dB (6) now on estimating the incident power density (Sf ). We first
estimate the antenna’s effective area (Âf ) for a frequency f
In practice, using an RTL-SDR with an RF Gain value gRF
based on the estimated antenna gain φ̂f using the equation
(which will generate a power offset ogRF ), and an antenna φ̂f
gain φf at frequency f , the power measurement produced at c2 10 10
frequency f can be expressed as Âf = 2 (9)
f 4π
(P¯f )dB = (φf )dB + gRF + ogRF + (PT ,f )dB (7) Then we estimate the incident power density using the cor-
rected EMF power measurement and the estimated effective
To estimate the total EMF power PT ,f , we correct the area
P̂T ,f
measurement by subtracting the estimated influences (in dB) Ŝf = (10)
Âf
(P̂T ,f )dB = (P¯f )dB − (φ̂f )dB − ogRF − gRF (8)
D. SUMMARY
Using this model, we estimate the total power to which the The work carried out can be summarized as follows. We first
receiving antenna is exposed to. compute the average power P̄f from a set of measurements

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FIGURE 11. Experiment setup 2 - EMF power source transmitting using hyperlog antenna.
(0.1ms time window) as described in equation (1). Then,
the average EMF power is corrected using the power offset
(O) and antenna gain (Ĝ) maps (which are obtained experi-
mentally) as described in equation (8). The antenna’s effec-
tive area Âf is estimated using the antenna gain, which in turn
is used along with the corrected EMF power measurement
P̂Tf to estimate the incident power density Ŝf . Fig. 10 summa-
rizes the complete incident power density estimation process
for a central frequency f .
E. EVALUATION METHOD
Here, we present the set of experiments undertaken to eval-
uate the RTL-SDR dongle as an electro-smog measurement
device.
1) EXPERIMENT 1 - RTL-SDR POWER MEASUREMENT
VALIDITY
We start by evaluating the consistency of the EMF power
measurements provided by the RTL-SDR. In other words,
we evaluate the dongle’s inherent measurement noise. Toward
this objective, we use the setup shown in fig. 3. We generate
continuous waves (CW) signals with different EMF powers
(−10, −20, −30, and −40 dBm) and collect 10000 measure-
ments for each one. We consider the generated power as a
reference to compare against. We use the difference between
the reference value and the mean of the measurements (bias),
standard deviation σ and the root mean squared error (RMSE)
to quantify the quality of the measurements. The experiment
is done for frequencies ranging from 400 MHz to 1000 MHz;
the average performance is summarized by an average mean
absolute error and average σ over the frequency range.
2) EXPERIMENT 2 - RTL-SDR POWER OFFSET CORRECTION
We use the same setup as above, generating a −30dBm con-
tinuous wave at different frequencies to be used as a reference
signal to evaluate the correction process. For every frequency,
we collect 1000 measurements per RF-gain setting. We then
correct them by subtracting the RF-gain setting value and
its associated power offset, and evaluate the output using
the mean absolute error (MAE) and Root mean square error
(RMSE).
3) EXPERIMENT 3 - ELECTRO-SMOG REFERENCE LEVEL
ESTIMATION
In this setup, and in order to present a comparison of our
system against calibrated ones, we use the Aaronia spectran
HF6065 spectrum analyzer as our reference. We plugged the
Aaronia BPSG signal generator into a directional HyperLog
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Y. Ben-Aboud et al.: Electro-Smog Monitoring Using Low-Cost SDR Dongles
FIGURE 12. Histogram of a sample set of measurements’ error.
7060 antenna and plugged the low-cost antenna into both the
RTL-SDR dongle and the Aaronia Spectran HF6065 spec-
trum analyzer (Fig. 11).
Using this setup, we generated different EMF power sig-
nals at different frequencies which are transmitted to the
RTL-SDR dongle and the Aaronia Spectran HF6065 spec-
trum analyzer via the Hyperlog antenna. We evalu-
ate the incident power density estimation against the
measurements provided by the reference EMF meter.
We start with a similar theoretical evaluation to the
one presented by Miguel Bilbao et al. in [33]. We use the
Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test to compare the cumulative
density functions (CDF) of the estimation and reference
measurements. We want to verify whether our estimations
and the reference measurements are drawn from the same
distribution (which is our null hypothesis). The computed
p-value of the KS test is an indicator of the goodness of fit
between CDFs. We consider a significance level of 5%.
Then, we numerically evaluate the estimations against the
reference measurements using the coefficient of determina-
tion R2 , MAE, and RMSE as error metrics.
III. EVALUATION RESULTS
In this section, we present the experimental results of the
experiments described above.
A. RTL-SDR POWER MEASUREMENT VALIDITY
Here, we evaluate the quality and consistency of the EMF
power measurements provided by the RTL-SDR.
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TABLE 1. Measurement error evaluation at 900MHz frequency.

TABLE 2. Results over the testing frequencies.

We present a sample of the results from the first experiment

conducted at 900MHz with different generated EMF powers
(−10, −20, −30, and −40dBm). Fig. 12 shows a histogram
of the sample measurements’ errors (10000 measurements at
−30dBm). Since the measurement errors follow a normal dis-
tribution, the chosen metrics (i.e. measurement bias, standard
deviation, and RMSE) are suitable for this evaluation. FIGURE 13. Power offset correction example.
Table 1 shows the results of experiment 1 for 900MHz.
It shows that the RTL-SDR can measure EMF power at
900MHz with an average bias of ±0.34dBm. Since the errors
follow a normal distribution, the low standard deviation (σ )
values show that in 95% of the cases the errors fall within
±0.024dBm from the bias. These results are promising since
we have less than 0.4dBm error at −30dBm with a very small
standard deviation which shows that the measurements are
accurate and consistent.
To generalize the results, Table 2 shows a summary of the
results of experiment 1 repeated for the other frequencies
(400 to 1000 MHz).
This first set of experiments shows that the quality of EMF
power measurements of the RTL-SDR dongle is accurate
and consistent (Average MAE of 0.441dBm with Average
σ = 0.023dBm), thus validating its use as an EMF power
measurement device.
FIGURE 14. Sample electro-smog exposure estimation evaluation.

B. RTL-SDR POWER OFFSET CORRECTION
As a first test, we use the obtained power offset map (fig. 7)
on the data presented in fig. 5. We can see in fig. 13 that the
offset is correctly adjusted.
Table 3 shows the results of experiment 2 in terms of MAE
of the corrected measurement against the generated EMF
power. It covers the tested frequencies and RF-Gain settings.
The results show error averages in the order of 0.3dBm with
0.88dBm at gRF = 12.5dB being the highest error.
We repeated the same experiment for −25dBm generated
power. In addition to the MAE, we computed the RMSE as
a second error metric. Table 4 shows the average MAE and
RMSE for different frequencies. We can see that both metrics
averaged over all frequencies and RF-gain settings show good
results, thus validating the amplifier non-linearity correction
process.
C. ELECTRO-SMOG REFERENCE LEVEL ESTIMATION
To evaluate the incident power density estimation, we per-
form experiment 3 and compare its performance against that
of the calibrated Aaronia Spectran HF6065. We start by show-
ing a sample measurement from experiment 3 at 900 MHz to
visualise the accuracy of our estimation method (see Fig. 14).
The estimation shows a visually good fit to the reference
data, which is numerically translated to an R2 of 0.994,
an MAE of 12.202 µW /m2 and an RMSE of 8.107. The CDFs

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TABLE 3. MAE and RMSE values of the power offset correction per RF-setting.
FIGURE 15. Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the estimation
errors.
TABLE 4. MAE values of the power offset correction per RF-setting.
of the incident power density estimations and the reference
measurements are presented in fig. 15.
The figure shows that both the estimation and reference
CDFs follow similar distributions which can be approxi-
mated with a gamma distribution. This is backed up with the
KS-test, which provided a D-statistic of 0.05 with a p-value
of 0.13 which is above the 0.05 significance level. We hence
retain the null hypothesis that both the reference system’s
measurements and the estimations obtained using our method
were drawn from the same distribution.
To thoroughly evaluate the estimation process, we repeated
experiment 3 for the frequencies of interest. Table 5 shows
numerical results of the evaluation in terms of MAE, RMSE,
and coefficient of determination (R2 ).
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Y. Ben-Aboud et al.: Electro-Smog Monitoring Using Low-Cost SDR Dongles
TABLE 5. Numerical evaluation of the electro-smog estimation process.
With an average R2 of 0.996 and low MAE and RMSE
values, the RTL-SDR dongle combined with our estimation
method is shown to provide an estimate of incident power
density measurement whose error in the order of 12µW /m2
compared to the reference system.
IV. DISCUSSION
Electromagnetic pollution (electro-smog) is a relatively new
concern related to the modern human activity and heavy use
of wireless communications. To help quantify the electro-
smog, we proposed a method of estimating the incident power
density using EMF power measurements from a low-cost
SDR dongle. We described how the average EMF power is
measured using the SDR dongle. Using a signal generator,
we showed that the SDR dongle is capable of providing EMF
measurements within 0.5dBm from the reference values, after
a warm-up period of around 15 minutes. This first result
is key because it validates the considered SDR dongle as
an EMF power measurement device, which is necessary for
subsequent estimation processes.
Next, we have experimentally shown that the amplifier
of the SDR dongle is nonlinear. We have addressed this
issue by associating every RF gain setting to its power offset
(power offset map), which we have averaged over different
frequencies and received EMF power signals. The evaluation
shows that the amplifier non-linearity can be accounted for
and the power measurement can be kept under 0.5dBm from
the reference signal for all RF gain settings.
After validating the power measurement of the SDR don-
gle, we introduced a low-cost antenna. The gain of the
latter influences the power measurement which has to be
accounted for. To do so, we estimated the antenna gain based
on its frequency response over all frequencies of interest and
subtracted it from the measurements to get the real EMF
power values.
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Y. Ben-Aboud et al.: Electro-Smog Monitoring Using Low-Cost SDR Dongles
The above implies that we can use the low-cost SDR
dongle and antenna to accurately measure the EMF power
at the location of the antenna which is very useful for many
applications (e.g. spectrum monitoring).
We finally used the antenna gain to estimate the effec-
tive area of the antenna which we used with the EMF
power measurements to estimate the incident power den-
sity. This estimation was evaluated against a reference Spec-
tran HF-6065 and resulted in an overall average MAE of
12µW /m2 and an average R2 of 0.996 which is very good.
With these results, we can claim that using our proposed
method, the low-cost SDR dongle with a low-cost antenna
can produce incident power density data of the same quality
as the Spectran HF-6065 and EMF meters.
When performing electro-smog measurements in fixed
positions without cost constraints, it is still better to use
high-end EMF measurement stations for highly accurate
measurements. But the fact that our method allows the SDR
dongle to accurately collect electro-smog measurements (in
terms of incident power density) opens many monitoring pos-
sibilities that were not possible to perform using traditional
EMF meters, especially when it comes to spatial analysis
of the electro-smog. The low cost and small size of the
SDR dongle allow for affordable large-scale deployments
of sensors making it a very good choice for high-density
Spatio-temporal electro-smog monitoring. It also enables and
facilitates mobile electro-smog monitoring.
V. CONCLUSION
In this work, we used the low-cost RTL-SDR dongle for both
EMF-power measurement and incident power density estima-
tion. We measured the average EMF-power and estimated and
corrected both the amplifier non-linearity and antenna gain,
then used the estimated antenna gain and average EMF-power
to estimate the incident power density. We performed a set of
experiments to validate the use of this dongle for EMF-power
and electro-smog estimation. Our results demonstrated that
these measurements are accurate enough to be used for
electro-smog monitoring. There are still many aspects of the
electro-smog that still need to be addressed. Some of the
directions for future work are:
• Including higher frequencies to the study (Wifi 2.44GHz
and LTE bands for example);
• Investigating efficient time-frequency sampling
approaches;
• Investigating validations for other types of SDR dongles.
• Close following of the deployment of the recent 5G and
its impact on the electro-smog values;
• Investigating spatial analysis of the electro-smog;
• Undertaking up-link and down-link communication
studies.
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YASSINE BEN-ABOUD received the M.Sc.
degree from the National School of Applied Sci-
ences (ENSA), Kenitra, Morocco, in 2016. He is
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the
National School of Computer Science and Sys-
tems Analysis (ENSIAS), Rabat, Morocco, and
the International University of Rabat (UIR), Rabat.
In 2017, he joined the Laboratory of Information
and Communication Technologies (TICLab), UIR,
where he is mainly working on the Internet of
Things platforms for environmental monitoring. He is specialized in infor-
mation systems security, especially in wireless sensors networks’ security.
MOUNIR GHOGHO (Fellow, IEEE) received the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the National Poly-
technic Institute of Toulouse, France, in 1993 and
1997, respectively. He was an EPSRC Research
Fellow with the University of Strathclyde,
Scotland, from September 1997 to Novem-
ber 2001. In December 2001, he joined the School
of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Univer-
sity of Leeds, England, where he was promoted
to a Full Professor, in 2008. While still affiliated
with the University of Leeds, in 2010, he joined the International Univer-
sity of Rabat, Morocco, where he is currently the Dean of the Doctoral
College and the Director of ICT Research Laboratory (TICLab). He is
also the Co-Founder and the Co-Director of the CNRS-Associated Inter-
national Research Laboratory DataNet. His research interests include signal
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Y. Ben-Aboud et al.: Electro-Smog Monitoring Using Low-Cost SDR Dongles
processing, machine learning, and wireless communication, in which he has
published over 300 journals and conference papers. He held invited scien-
tist/professor positions at Telecom Paris-Tech, France; NII, Japan; BUPT,
China; University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain; ENSICA, Toulouse; Technical
University of Darmstadt, Germany; and Minnesota University, USA. He was
a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society SPCOM Technical Com-
mittee, the IEEE Signal Processing Society SPTM Technical Committee, and
the IEEE Signal Processing Society SAM Technical Committee. He is cur-
rently a member of the Steering Committee of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL
AND INFORMATION PROCESSING OVER NETWORKS. He was awarded the U.K.
Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, in 2000, and the IBM
Faculty Award, in 2013. He organized many conferences and workshops,
including the 2019 Intelligent Environments Conference, the 2018 ITCities
Workshop, the 2013 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO),
and the 2010 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing for Advanced Wireless
Communications (SPAWC). In the past, he served as an Associate Editor
for Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING,
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, and Digital Signal Processing journal
(Elsevier).
SOFIE POLLIN (Senior Member, IEEE) received
the Ph.D. degree (Hons.) from KU Leuven,
in 2006. From 2006 to 2008, she continued her
research on wireless communications, energy-
efficient networks, cross-layer design, coexis-
tence, and cognitive radio at UC Berkeley. In 2008,
she returned to imec to become a Principal Scien-
tist at Green Radio Team. She is currently an Asso-
ciate Professor with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, KU Leuven. Her research interests
include networked systems that require networks that are ever more dense,
heterogeneous, battery powered, and spectrum constrained. She is a BAEF
Fellow and a Marie Curie Fellow.
ABDELLATIF KOBBANE (Senior Member,
IEEE) received the M.S. (research) degree in
computer science, telecommunication, and mul-
timedia from Mohammed V-Agdal University,
Rabat, Morocco, in 2003, and the joint Ph.D.
degree in computer science from Mohammed
V-Agdal University, and the University of Avi-
gnon, France, in September 2008. He has
been a Full Professor with the Ecole Nationale
Suprieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Sys-
temes (ENSIAS), Mohammed V University, Rabat, since 2009. He is an
Adjunct Professor with the L2TI Laboratory, Paris 13 University, France.
His research interests include wireless networking, performance evaluation
using advanced technique in game theory, and MDP in wireless mobile
networks: the IoT, SDN and NFV, 5G networks, resources management in
wireless mobile networks, cognitive radio, mobile computing, mobile social
networks, caching and backhaul problem, beyond 5G, and future networks.
He is the author of several scientific publications in top IEEE conferences
and journals, such as IEEE ICC, IEEE GLOBECOM, IWCMC, ICNC, and
IEEE WCNC. He has more than ten years of computer sciences and telecom
experience, in Europe (France) and Morocco, in the areas of performances
evaluation in wireless mobile networks, mobile cloud networking, cognitive
radio, ad-hoc networks, and future network 5G. He is a Senior Member
of ComSoc IEEE, an Ex-Secretary of ExCom IEEE Morocco Section,
the Vice Chair of IEEE Communication Software Technical Committee,
and the Ex-President and the Founder of Association of Research in Mobile
Wireless Networks and Embedded Systems (MobiTic), Morocco. He is
also the TPC Co-Chair of IEEE ICC 2020, the TPC Chair of Wireless
Networking Symposium of the International Wireless Communications and
Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2019), the General Co-Chair of
WINCOM 2020 and 2015, and the Executive Chair of WINCOM 2017.
VOLUME 9, 2021