Transmit power estimation with a single monitor in multi-band networks

Transmit power estimation is widely used in network monitoring, power-aware design of MANETs, primary user detection in cognitive radio networks and many other areas. Traditional methods for transmit power estimation are trilateration-based, which require an underlying infrastructure with at least three monitors. In this paper, we propose a novel transmit power estimation method which utilizes the nuance of the received signal strength at different frequencies. Our method only needs one monitor, thus has less hardware requirement and is much easier to carry around. We use a support vector machine to facilitate the estimation, and conduct real-world experiments to validate our method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to achieve the accuracy as high as 90%, which in practice outperforms the trilateration method using multiple monitors.