Field Trial on Cognitive Radio Technology: Adaptive Co-Use of Heterogeneous Wireless Media on Multiple Base Stations

As advanced integrated network architecture, "cognitive radio technologies," which aim to improve the spectrum efficiency, have been studied. In the cognitive radio networks, each node recognizes radio conditions, and according to them, optimizes their wireless communication routes with the integration of the heterogeneous wireless media not only by switching over them but also aggregating and utilizing them simultaneously. The adaptive control of switchover use and concurrent use of various wireless media will offer a stable and flexible wireless communication. In this paper, we introduce our cognitive radio testbed that has IEEE802.16 and IEEE802.11 interfaces, and perform the field trial in order to experimentally examine the effectiveness of the cognitive radio technologies. The experimental results show that the concurrent use of IEEE802.16 and IEEE802.11 wireless media offers high IP throughput performance and furthermore, the adaptive route control according to the radio conditions improves the IP throughput by more than 20% and reduce the one-way delay to less than 1/6. It is found that the cognitive radio technologies can provide the appropriate wireless communication routes to meet various demands for application QoS.