Proceedings Article | 25 May 2012
Lei Ding, Yalin Sagduyu, Justin Yackoski, Babak Azimi-Sadjadi, Jason Li, Renato Levy, Tammaso Melodia
KEYWORDS: Chromium, Network architectures, Plutonium, Analog electronics, Pollution control, Prototyping, Relays, Signal attenuation, Attenuators, Electromagnetic simulation
We present a high fidelity cognitive radio (CR) network emulation platform for wireless system tests, measure-
ments, and validation. This versatile platform provides the configurable functionalities to control and repeat
realistic physical channel effects in integrated space, air, and ground networks. We combine the advantages of
scalable simulation environment with reliable hardware performance for high fidelity and repeatable evaluation
of heterogeneous CR networks. This approach extends CR design only at device (software-defined-radio) or
lower-level protocol (dynamic spectrum access) level to end-to-end cognitive networking, and facilitates low-cost
deployment, development, and experimentation of new wireless network protocols and applications on frequency-
agile programmable radios. Going beyond the channel emulator paradigm for point-to-point communications,
we can support simultaneous transmissions by network-level emulation that allows realistic physical-layer inter-
actions between diverse user classes, including secondary users, primary users, and adversarial jammers in CR
networks. In particular, we can replay field tests in a lab environment with real radios perceiving and learning
the dynamic environment thereby adapting for end-to-end goals over distributed spectrum coordination channels
that replace the common control channel as a single point of failure. CR networks offer several dimensions of
tunable actions including channel, power, rate, and route selection. The proposed network evaluation platform
is fully programmable and can reliably evaluate the necessary cross-layer design solutions with configurable op-
timization space by leveraging the hardware experiments to represent the realistic effects of physical channel,
topology, mobility, and jamming on spectrum agility, situational awareness, and network resiliency. We also
provide the flexibility to scale up the test environment by introducing virtual radios and establishing seamless
signal-level interactions with real radios. This holistic wireless evaluation approach supports a large-scale, het-
erogeneous, and dynamic CR network architecture and allows developing cross-layer network protocols under
high fidelity, repeatable, and scalable wireless test scenarios suitable for heterogeneous space, air, and ground
networks.
