A Testbed Development Framework for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio networking is a promising approach to fulfill the future's need for intelligent, high-performance communication and improve the efficiency of overall spectrum utilization. Testbed evaluation of protocols and algorithms is a must for the development of cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we present an integrated testbed framework for cognitive radio networks. The framework includes necessary components for cognitive radio operations: flexible RF front end, software define signal processing, adaptive MAC layer and network layer as well as a cross layer management interface. Such a design eases the cross layer configuration and performance optimization of cognitive protocol stack, while retaining the advantage of modularity. We design a testbed for ad-hoc cognitive radio network.