Enabling Cognitive-Radio paradigm on commercial off-the-shelf 802.11 hardware

Abstract

Cognitive Radio paradigm (CR) has been recognized as key enabler for next generation wireless networking: the pos- sibility to access the limited radio spectrum in an oppor- tunistic manner allows secondary users to boost their trans- mission performance without interfering with existing pri- mary networks. Full testing and experimenting with this paradigm, however, is still a tough task, given either the i) limited capabilities above the PHY layer of cheap SDR so- lutions, or the ii) heavy investment required for setting up multi-node testbeds powered by FPGAs. In this demo we show how we leveraged our Wireless MAC Processor archi- tecture to tackle the two issues at the same time, providing a highly reconfigurable cognitive solution for wireless local area networks on top of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) 802.11 devices. We demonstrate a typical CR use case where local and network-wide cognitive loops interact for configur- ing secondary users real time channel switching in reaction to channel state mutation. We also prove the flexibility of our Wireless MAC Processor (WMP) architecture for exten- sive testing of the CR paradigm.