A Real Time Testbed for the Evaluation of Cognitive Radio MAC

Cognitive Radio is a promising technology to solve the problem of increasing spectrum shortage in wireless communication. It allows secondary users(SUs) to opportunistically access idle spectrum of primary users(PUs) while ensuring collision perceived by PUs under a specific requirement. Testbed is essential to advance the development of cognitive radio networks. This paper presents a real time testbed for the evaluation of the cognitive radio MAC algorithm. The testbed supports the necessary components of cognitive radio including programmable RF transceiver, software-defined MAC layer and adaptive network layer to support multi-PU multi-SU cognitive radio networks. It is much easier to configure and control than the traditional FPGA-based testbed by using system-on-chip(SoC) programmable processors. We present the main features and the implementation details of the testbed in this paper. We also introduce an experiment using the testbed to evaluate the performance of an adaptive CR MAC algorithm proposed by us.