# An Assessment of Environmental RF Noise Due to IoT Deployment
## 2 Literature Review  
The topic of IoT has been approached several times with different interests. One of the trends focuses on architectural IoT and business opportunities. [PERSON] et al. [13] described that recently, researchers focalized on the \"thing\" itself from a device-based approach to implementing specific IoT applications beneficial for humans. [PERSON] et al. [1] discussed the IoT techniques based on data specifications with an interest in data processing and storage. They suggested that the IoT industry would be one of the accelerants of big data science. [PERSON] et al. [14] highlighted IoT vulnerability issues: attacks against confidentiality, integrity, accountability, and authentication, and countermeasures. [PERSON] et al. [15]elaborated on the security perspectives: data leakage, eavesdropping, hacking, software exploitation, and device security. All these noteworthy publications have considered that the things are already successfully operable and are located in friendly vicinities, which may not be the case; thus, the contribution of this study is to evaluate a separate issue, namely, the impact of massive deployment of IoT technologies over the ambient radio noise floor. Furthermore, we aim to provide relevant insight into the contribution of the IoT RF operations to environmental radio noise. [PERSON] [16] expected a detrimental performance from RF systems when the spectrum becomes increasingly crowded by interference and radio noise generated by various sources. It is vital to monitor the ambient electromagnetic levels continuously. According to [PERSON] and [PERSON] [17], a common approach for estimating the noise level is to refer to the ITU report [18]. This document provides detailed information to calculate the amplitude of ambient radio noise. Still, experts have raised concerns that this referral ITU study is now too old, as their data came from measurements conducted more than 50 years ago. Reports have questioned the essence of ITU recommendations as, after half a century, technology has advanced many changes that the electromagnetic environments have witnessed. If they raised this question in a study conducted in 2006, then it provided more reasons to work on new measurements to obtain actual data. Their paper also describes measurement techniques performed over short-wave frequencies (30 MHz) using loop antennas; however, following these approaches and utilizing equipment at much higher frequencies could not guarantee success. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [19] argued that the same ITU referral report based its analysis and results from the data collected in environments in the United States of America. For higher accuracy, conducting the same exercise at different locations was relevant. [PERSON] [20] conducted similar studies in Australia. This was a motivation to assess ambient RF noise in South African environments. [PERSON] [5] indicated that IoT operates with different commercial communication technologies and frequency bands; however, another report [3] categorized wide-area IoT devices as low-power RF devices on unlicensed frequency bands. Research conducted by [PERSON] [6] included survey campaigns on artificial emissions in other frequency bands: 1563.42 to 1587.42 MHz, 2025 to 2110 MHz, 2400 to 2482.50 MHz, and 23.6 to 24.0 GHz. Regarding the frequency bands of interest, this paper limited its scope to explore 433 MHz, 868 MHz, and 2.4 GHz, which may be the three most exploited ISM frequency bands in the South African IoT and M2M Industry. The RF noise receiver system is crucial to the ambient RF noise survey equipment. This paper employed the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and software-defined radio (SDR) system. [PERSON] et al. [21] used the same hardware platform to analyze measurements for connectivity for vehicles connected over the LTE network in urban and rural locations.