Designing and deploying a building-wide cognitive radio network testbed

Wireless communication technology is constantly advancing with the primary objective being to improve the quality of service for the end user. Cognitive radio is a technology capable of advancing wireless communications to the next generation of intelligent devices. Integrating cognition into wireless applications such as dynamic spectrum access, radio resource management, wireless distributed computing, and even traditional protocol stacks has already been shown to provide benefits related to the communications quality of service. The majority of cognitive radio related research has been limited to theoretical frameworks and simulations or in a few cases, demonstrating prototype DSA devices on a small scale. In order to continue advancing in this area, larger-scale experiments that are reproducible and able to be moved beyond theoretical simulations are required. Virginia Tech has built a testbed for software-defined and cognitive radio related research for the purpose of rapid next-generation communication system prototyping using a medium scale size network of flexible wireless nodes. In this article we present the details of the development, design decision rationale, and deployment of this testbed in hopes that it will be both used by the research community, and duplicated and improved in order to further the development of the many different facets of cognitive radio research.