Standardizing The Impact Assessment of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) in Space-Based Remote Sensing: Challenges and Benefits

In this paper, we describe the attempt of the Frequency Allocation in Remote Sensing Technical Committee (FARS-TC) from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) to standardize the impact assessment of radio frequency interference (RFI) especially in the field of spaceborne remote sensing. Multiple radio services have been sharing a common radio band with remote sensing satellites, resulting in inevitable interferences between each other. In other cases, some services accidentally emit their signal to nearby frequency band. Detecting interference and locating its source is a necessary task to guarantee data integrity. Given that remote sensing satellites carry unique payloads, the effect that RFI have depends on each sensor. For this reason, the RFI impact assessments have been usually developed with one mission or application in mind.Standardizing the impact assessment of RFI will benefit to make a public identification system so that we can monitor RFI effectively. In this paper, we introduce the working group in the IEEE Standards Association named 'P4006 Standard for Remote Sensing Frequency Band Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) Impact Assessment' which is handled by the IEEE GRSS FARS-TC and its recent activities.