Implementation of Cognitive Radio Networks to evaluate spectrum management strategies in real-time

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper illustrates a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP)-based real-time testbed that is able to evaluate different spectrum management solutions that exploit the Cognitive Radio (CR) paradigm. The main objective of this testbed is to provide an accurate and realistic platform by which the performance of innovative spectrum management solutions for a wide set of scenarios and use cases in the context of Opportunistic Networks (ONs) and Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) can be entirely validated and assessed before their implementation in real systems. Real-time platforms are essential to carry out significant studies and to accurately assess the performance of innovative solutions before their implementation in the real world. This work provides a comprehensive description of the testbed, highlighting many interesting implementation details and illustrating its applicability for different studies that rely on the CR paradigm. Then, a particular application in a realistic Digital Home (DH) scenario is also illustrated, which allows demonstrating the effectiveness of the real-time testbed and assessing its practicality in terms of user-perceived end-to-end Quality of Experience (QoE) in a realistic environment.

A Distributed Testbed for 5G Scenarios: An Experimental Study

“…Conventionally, a testbed consists of BSs or nodes connected to a single traditional processing unit (e.g., a personal computer or a laptop) using a wired medium via a switch [2] (see Section 5). The BSs and nodes exchange control messages and data packets over the wired and wireless media, respectively.…”

“…In [2,[31][32][33][34][35][36], a testbed consists of BSs or nodes connected to a single traditional processing unit (e.g., a personal computer or a laptop) via a switch (i.e., Gigabit D-link) [2] (see Figure 4a). This allows the central controller to exchange control messages with BSs and nodes via a switch in a centralized manner, while the BSs and nodes can exchange data packets using the wireless medium [37] in a distributed manner.…”

“…The rest of this section presents the two types of testbeds and their differences. Figure 8a shows a testbed in which BSs or nodes are connected to a single traditional processing unit (PCU) (i.e., a personal computer) via a switch [2]. The personal computer has a CORE i7 processor, a 8 GB RAM, and a 1 terabyte of storage space in hard disk, and it provides a centralized approach to handle D2D communication.…”

“…Fifth generation (5G) is a promising next-generation cellular network armed with new features, particularly device-to-device (D2D) communication that enables direct communication between devices without going through base stations (BSs). This helps to offload traffic from macrocell (MC) BSs to small cell (SC) (i.e., femtocell) BSs, as well as user equipment and devices, including sensors, while increasing network cell coverage via multihop transmission [1][2][3]. In 5G, a node can operate…”

“…In addition, traffic offloading from backbone routes and the central controller to distributed nodes is investigated in [13,14], the transmission delay is predicted based on channel states in [15], and the feasiblity of D2D in 5G environment is investigated in [16]. Some researchers conduct proof of concept experiments; however, the focus is primarily on the physical layer, particularly spectrum management in [2], interference mitigation in [17], channel sensing in [18], as well as on the data link layer, particularly channel hopping (or switches) in [19].This study focuses on the networking aspect over a 5G-based platform using universal software radio peripheral with GNU radio (USRP/GNU radio) units and Raspberry Pi3 B+ (RP3) processors [20]. GNU radio is an open source software that serves as development toolkit [21] in the platform (for more details see Section 2.3).…”