Adaptive wireless-network testbed for cognitive radio technology

Abstract

Coordination is expected between mobile terminals, base stations/access points, and spectrum-management servers in cognitive-enabled wireless networks. A testbed for cognitive radio needs to deal with these components to verify low-level configuration protocols and functions on cognitive-radio devices, and to evaluate high-level network protocols and throughputs including new MACs designed for cognitive radio using various applications running on large numbers of nodes. We propose a testbed for an adaptive wireless network under which terminals communicate using both real cognitive-radio devices and those virtually configured. All the stacks from the MAC to the application layer are programmable conforming to the common interface for the MIRAI Cognitive Radio Execution Framework (MIRAI-CREF). The configuration for the physical layer is selected from either a real device or a software-defined pseudo device, which together provide real physical-layer phenomena dependent on device implementations and scalability in the number of nodes. The testbed works with the two physical-layer configurations mixed at the same time. The testbed is flexible enough to configure cognitive-radio device functions and protocols. It is also intended to be used not only by local users but also remote users via the Internet to evaluate protocols and various cognitive features.