Unsupervised Spectrum Anomaly Detection Method for Unauthorized Bands

With the rapid development of wireless communication, spectrum plays increasingly important role in both military and civilian fields. Spectrum anomaly detection aims at detecting emerging anomaly signals and spectrum usage behavior in the environment, which is indispensable to secure safety and improve spectrum efficiency. However, spectrum anomaly detection faces many difficulties, especially for unauthorized frequency bands. In unauthorized bands, the composition of spectrum is complex and the anomaly usage patterns are unknown in prior. In this paper, a Variational Autoencoder- (VAE-) based method is proposed for spectrum anomaly detection in unauthorized bands. First of all, we theoretically prove that the anomalies in unauthorized bands will introduce Background Noise Enhancement (BNE) effect and Anomaly Signal Disappearance (ASD) effects after VAE reconstruction. Then, we introduce a novel anomaly metric termed as percentile (PER) score, which focuses on capturing the distribution variation of reconstruction error caused by ASD and BNE. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, we developed an ISM Anomaly Detection (IAD) dataset. The proposed PER score achieves superior performance against different type of anomalies. For QPSK type anomaly, our method increases the recall rate from 80% to 93% while keeping a false alarm rate of 5%. The proposed method is beneficial to broadband spectrum sensing and massive spectrum data processing. The code will be released at git@github.com:QXSLAB/vae_ism_ano.git.