Distributed Sensing of Radio Spectrum Occupancy Amid COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) performed a targeted campaign of measurements of channel power and occupancy rate in the radio spectrum. This is the dataset that resulted from that effort.Measurements were performed in 13 residential sites after a rapid engineering development effort, followed by spot measurements at a local hospital. The study targeted radio frequency allocations that support key wireless data infrastructure. These included the cellular network bands below 1 GHz, and unlicensed bands that support wireless local-area network (WLAN) and wireless personal area network (WPAN) traffic in 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The principal test locations were the home telework sites of NIST research staff, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and summer high school interns. Measurements continued where possible from late spring in 2020 until the autumn of 2021.The resulting data are released here in the following forms:1) Time series of band power, integrated on 4-MHz bandwidth in 0.5 ms bins;2) Time series of band power, denoised to remove average additive noise produced by the receiver;3) Occupancy durations computed from the denoised band power time series;4) Histograms of band power readings computed from denoised band power time series; and5) Diagnostic network profiling data that indicates PHY characteristics of cellular and WLAN signals.