Opportunistic Rainfall Sensing: State of the Art and Perspectives in Italy

Opportunistic rainfall sensing through the wireless links deployed by telecommunication companies and service providers is an interesting use case of the concept of Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC). This paper surveys the results of the research activity on this topic in Italy. Several studies highlight that the retrieved rainfall fields and the outputs of hydrological models based on opportunistic data are comparable with the ones gathered from weather radars and rain gauges. These results together with the expected trend of wireless networks towards higher frequency bands (i.e. more sensitive to rain) may help in turning a research topic into a potential new service for network providers.