Physical-layer data of IRIDIUM satellites broadcast messages

Data Brief. 2023 Jan 13:46:108905. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2023.108905. eCollection 2023 Feb.

Abstract

Physical-layer information associated with wireless communications is a trove of data, that can be leveraged by several research communities, e.g., networking and security. Indeed, such information (IQ samples) represents the signal at the very beginning of the receiver chain, just after the demodulation, and they embed valuable information about both the channel and the transmitter, which can be used for several purposes, e.g., protocol design, network performance analysis, and transmitter fingerprinting. In this paper, we present the data of a measurement campaign targeting the messages of the IRIDIUM satellite constellation. The resulting dataset has been collected throughout a measurement period of about 2 months and it comprises +3.8 M IRIDIUM Ring Alert (IRA) packets-the cleartext packets broadcasted by the IRIDIUM satellites. Our dataset includes several pieces of information included in the IRA packets, i.e., the reception timestamp, position of the transmitting satellite on the ground, satellite ID, beam ID, etc. Moreover, for each packet, we also collected the corresponding raw IQ samples, for a total of +7.6B data. We believe that the amount of collected data, the duration of the measurement campaign, and the information included herein, will be valuable assets for the research community.

Keywords: Iq samples; Iridium ring alert; Satellite communications; Software-defined radio; Wireless communications.