Drones have carried weapons, drugs, explosives and illegal packages in the recent past, raising strong concerns from public authorities. While existing drone monitoring systems only focus on detecting drone presence, localizing or fingerprinting the drone, there is a lack of a solution for estimating the additional load carried by a drone. In this paper, we present a novel passive RF system, namely DroneScale, to monitor the wireless signals transmitted by commercial drones and then confirm their models and loads. Our key technical contribution is a proposed technique to passively capture vibration at high resolution (i.e., 1Hz vibration) from afar, which was not possible before. We prototype DroneScale using COTS RF components and illustrate that it can monitor the body vibration of a drone at the targeted resolution. In addition, we develop learning algorithms to extract the physical vibration of the drone from the transmitted signal to infer the model of a drone and the load carried by it. We evaluate the DroneScale system using 5 different drone models, which carry external loads of up to 400g. The experimental results show that the system is able to estimate the external load of a drone with an average accuracy of 96.27%. We also analyze the sensitivity of the system with different load placements with respect to the drone's body, flight modes, and distances up to 200 meters.

We present SparSDR, a resource-efficient architecture for softwaredefined radios whose backhaul bandwidth and compute power requirements scale in inverse proportion to the sparsity (in time and frequency) of the signals received. SparSDR requires dramatically fewer resources than existing approaches to process many popular protocols while retaining both flexibility and fidelity. We demonstrate that our approach has negligible impact on signal quality, receiver sensitivity, and processing latency. The SparSDR architecture makes it possible to capture signals across bandwidths far wider than the capacity of a radio's backhaul through the addition of lightweight frontend processing and corresponding backend reconstruction to restore the signals to their original sample rate. We employ SparSDR to develop two wideband applications running on a USRP N210 and a Raspberry Pi 3+: an IoT sniffer that scans 100 MHz of bandwidth and decodes received BLE packets, and a wideband Cloud SDR receiver that requires only residential-class Internet uplink capacity. We show that our SparSDR implementation fits in the constrained resources of popular low-cost SDR platforms, such as the AD Pluto.