Wireless distributed sensing and computing in SDR based radio network — Implementation and applications

As the important step towards building the large scale cognitive radio network in TTU(Tennessee Technological University), a wireless distributed sensor network has been embedded into a novel radio cluster, in which the cluster nodes are running over the SDR(Software Defined Radio) platform, e.g., USRP(Universal Software Radio Peripheral). This network demonstrates the combination of the wireless distributed sensing applications with corresponding communications capability. The SDR based sensing nodes are capable of sensing the environment in real time manner, while keeping the wireless networking simultaneously. The centralized network topology with round-robin control protocol has been deployed. The network implemented in this paper enables the real time wireless sensing and big network data fusion. The centralized and distributed computing schemes are demonstrated considering wireless distributed sensing applications. For low data rate networking, the in-network distributed processing of the SDR nodes plays key role to the mobile sensing applications, in accelerating the computing as well as reducing the traffic burden and processing delay.