CorteXlab: A Facility for Testing Cognitive Radio Networks in a Reproducible Environment

Abstract

While many theoretical and simulation works have highlighted the potential gains of cognitive radio, several technical issues still need to be evaluated from an experimental point of view. Deploying complex heterogeneous system scenarios is tedious, time consuming and hardly reproducible. To address this problem, we have developed a new experimental facility, called CorteXlab, that allows complex multi-node cognitive radio scenarios to be easily deployed and tested by anyone in the world. Our objective is not to design new software defined radio (SDR) nodes, but rather to provide a comprehensive access to a large set of high performance SDR nodes. The CorteXlab facility offers a 167 m 2 electromagnetically (EM) shielded room and integrates a set of 24 universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) from National Instruments, 18 PicoSDR nodes from Nutaq and 42 IoT-Lab wireless sensor nodes from Hikob. CorteXlab is built upon the foundations of the SensLAB testbed and is based the free and open-source toolkit GNU Radio. Automation in scenario deployment, experiment start, stop and results collection is performed by an experiment controller, called Minus. CorteXlab is in its final stages of development and is already capable of running test scenarios. In this contribution, we show that CorteXlab is able to easily cope with the usual issues faced by other testbeds providing a reproducible experiment environment for CR experimentation.

Cache-Aided Polar Coding: From Theory to Implementation

“…3) The practical implementation of the overall cache-aided Polar coding scheme is validated with real test-bed measurements on FIT/CorteXlab [37]. The present paper thus significantly extends and improves over the previous testbed implementation in [38], which implemented the original coded caching scheme using the GRASP minimum graph-colouring algorithm.…”

“…The proposed scheme of Sections III-IV (with the simplified conflict graph construction in Section IV) was also tested on the FIT/CorteXlab testbed (http://www.cortexlab.fr/), which is composed of SISO or MIMO software defined radio (SDR) nodes [37]. The testbed is hosted in a 180 m 2 shielded room, which is partly covered with electromagnetic wave absorbing material, and its layout is shown in Fig.…”

Reconfigurable software-defined radar testbed with built-in validation

“…Lastly, CorteXlab at INSA, which consists of 38 SDR nodes and 42 nodes of wireless sensors. This testbed allows users to remotely execute applications in real time [16].…”