An Assessment of Environmental RF Noise Due to IoT Deployment

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has contributed to an increase in the production volume of RF-featured equipment. According to statistics from the literature, the IoT industry will soon deploy billions of products. While the concept behind these applications seems exciting, this paper sought to assess the effects the radio emissions produced by IoT products would have on the ambient radio noise levels within the unlicensed frequency bands of 433 MHz, 868 MHz, and 2.4 GHz. The study extended to three environments: industrial, urban, and suburban. This study developed an IoT noise generator (ING) device to emulate RF noise signals in the desired IoT radio transmission band. The paper presents a simplified radio noise surveying system (RNSS) for data collection of ambient radio noise from five South African candidate sites. The statistical and empirical analysis agree that the level of ambient radio noise was directly proportional to the rate of IoT radio activities. The slopes of the regression lines demonstrate that 80% of the analyzed data developed augmenting trends. Approximately 20% of the data show declining trends.