No abstract

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.

No abstract

Spectrum Sensing is one of the important tasks for the wireless devices but due to fading, shadowing and noise the performance of individual spectrum sensing devices is not ideal. Cooperative Sensing is seen as a way to improve the performance of individual spectrum sensing devices resultantly improving the efficient utilization of radio bandwidth and minimizing the interference among wireless devices. State of the art are extensive simulations and analysis on cooperative sensing although there are also number of performance evaluations of various fusion rules of cooperative sensing using software defined radios and FPGAs. The limitation of previous work is that they do not address the question how we can improve the overall performance of real systems with cooperative sensing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental work which presents cooperative sensing protocols with standard radios and evaluates the system performance using cooperative sensing. With IEEE 802.15.4 equipped radio devices we model primary, secondary and cooperating users. We implement cooperative sensing protocols, setup a scenario, perform measurements and compare system performance with and without cooperative sensing. All the experiments are automated with the wisebed testbed software. The evaluation results of cooperative sensing protocols indicate new challenges for optimization and provide awareness to the problem of improving the overall system performance.