Law enforcement and public safety agencies rely on the 700 MHz/800 MHz spectrum band which are affected by co-channel interference from the commercial radio networks along with unintentional as well as intentional radio frequency interferers (RFIs). The first responders need to be alerted or have prior knowledge of potential interferences at a mission site. This will enable them to adopt strategies to mitigate such potentially disruptive RFI sources and ensure reliable communication during the mission. In this effort, a cost-effective, lightweight and portable Interference Detection and Analysis Device (I-DAD) will be developed to enable robust RFI detection, characterization and localization. The situational awareness device, I-DAD, consist of two important utilities; (i) Short-time Fractional Fourier transform based intERference detectIon and characterizatioN (SNIFFER) technique capable of detecting and analyzing a wide range of RFI waveforms. SNIFFER will perform the 2D analysis of captured samples by representing the signal in time-fractional Fourier domain frequency plane measuring the angular distribution of the signal's energy. In contrast to traditional RSSI based approaches, SNIFFER is designed to detect even the lowest power RFI source. (ii) Information gathered by multiple I-DADs is used to perform geolocation. A novel SNIFF-LOC technique is proposed, that leverages the signal parameters estimated by SNIFFER to estimate the location of its source. SNIFF-LOC would present near optimal performance as it is built on the estimated signal intelligence in contrast to other traditional approaches based on TDOA, FDOA, AOA, RSSI where most of the other signal parameters are discarded.
