A reusable and extendable testbed for implementation and evaluation of cooperative sensing

Cooperative sensing has been identified as a potential improvement for cognitive radios to perceive their radio environment. In the past, algorithms have been developed by analysis and simulations exclusively. With cheaper hardware experimental platforms have been used for evaluation purpose recently. Simulations lack realistic propagation models for radio transmission but are reproducible compared to experimental evaluation done by hand. The effects of reduced detection probability and false alarms are not realistic in these simulations. In this paper, we suggest a reusable and extendable automated testbed software and instructions for deployment of own testbeds. Primary users as well as secondary users with cooperating cognitive radios can be flexibly deployed in the testbed within seconds. The advantage is that a series of even long lasting measurements including automatic logging of results can be easily repeated. Results can be assessed on the fly during the ongoing evaluation by accessing debug output remotely. The testbed supports stationary, portable, and in the future mobile radio devices for flexible scenarios as well as monitoring devices for debugging. The testbed and the radio devices are validated by deploying primary and secondary user in a small scenario whose outcome was analyzed beforehand. The results are as predicted and show the usefulness of this approach.