CorteXlab: An open FPGA-based facility for testing SDR & cognitive radio networks in a reproducible environment

While many theoretical and simulation works have already highlighted the potential gain of cognitive radio, several technical issues still have to be evaluated and overcome from an experimental viewpoint. Our team is currently developing a new experimental facility remotely accessible and dedicated to this problem. CorteXlab is developed in the framework of a nationwide French program Future Internet of Things which proposes a federated and competitive infrastructure. The Cor-teXlab facility offers a 167m² EM shielded room and integrates a set of 22 USRP from National Instrument, 16 picoSDR nodes from Nutaq and 42 IoT-Lab wireless sensor nodes from Hikob. CorteXlab is built on the network architecture developed for the SensLAB testbed and exploits the free and open-source toolkit GNU-radio. All nodes are remotely accessible through a software interface called Minus. The demo presented at Infocom describes the facility and shows the process a user should follow to deploy his own experiment. Two typical scenarios involving several nodes are built and deployed live. The first scenario is based on IEEE 802.15.4 communication between two picoSDR nodes. The second scenario is dealing with an avoiding-interference use case where the previous two picoSDRs are communicating while a cognitive MIMO-OFDM transceiver running on one picoSDR must avoid interference with them.