Software architecture design for a Dynamic Spectrum Allocation-enabled Cognitive Radio testbed

The evolution of wireless communications is bringing into reality the dense deployment of femto and local area cells, which represents a challenging scenario for proving the effectiveness of Cognitive Radio (CR) frameworks. In particular the Dynamic Spectrum Allocation (DSA) paradigm aims at solving the resource allocation problem in a fully autonomous way. While in both CR and standardization lot of effort has been spent in developing efficient DSA algorithms, their research-oriented software radio implementation is still disregarded. In this paper, the design approach used for the definition of a CR-based, local area-oriented testbed platform is introduced. In particular, the testbed design in relation to the selected scenario and the architecture of the developed software framework are presented. An analysis of the performance of key software functionalities is also provided: preliminary results show a computational load compatible with nowadays Commercial-Off-The-Shelf computers.