Demonstration of plug-and-play cognitive radio network emulation testbed

In this demonstration, we present the capabilities of a comprehensive cognitive radio system, CREATE-NEST. We provide hardware demonstration of a Cognitive Radio nEtworking ArchiTecturE (CREATE) over the Network Emulator Simulator Testbed (NEST). CREATE is a distributed and scalable network architecture operating without a common control channel and is equipped with cross-layer design functionalities. NEST provides plug-and-play cognitive network implementation with software-defined radios (SDRs). In this demonstration, we use eight USRP N210 radios, each running full network protocol stack and communicating with each other over multiple hops and different frequency bands. Instead of over-the-air transmissions, NEST uses RFnest (Radio Frequency Network Emulator Simulator Tool) to generate the air environment by changing channel properties digitally. We demonstrate the capability of cognitive network nodes to discover local neighborhood, sense the spectrum, estimate channels, dynamically access the spectrum, select channels, route traffic, and avoid congestion, primary users and RF interferers. We present different topology and mobility scenarios and show the cognitive radio performance (throughput, delay, energy, and overhead) with interactive GUI.