II-EN: Radio Testbed Upgrade to Enable Wideband and MIMO Experiments

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

The project upgrades the Cognitive Radio Network Testbed (CORNET) at Virginia Tech (VT) by adding new processing, networking and radio frequency (RF) hardware and software and redesigning the testbed architecture to enable cutting edge research across many engineering and science disciplines. CORNET currently comprises 48 software programmable radio nodes that have facilitated experimental research and education in wireless communications for seven years. The upgrade will add the necessary radio and computing infrastructure to support compelling CISE research and experimentation in emerging and new technological/regulatory/economic areas in communications, computing and transportation, among others, through collaborations with computer science, electrical and computer engineering and aerospace and ocean engineering researchers at Virginia Tech. The new CORNET testbed enables advancing research in radio frequency (RF) spectrum access, resource virtualization for effective on demand service provisioning through sharing, and federation of distributed resources (RF spectrum, radio nodes, computing nodes, testbeds) with applications to coexistence of government commercial communications systems and radars, autonomous vehicles, fifth generation (5G) cellular communications, Internet of Things, and many others. The proposed upgrades are needed to enable CORNET to continue to serve cross department and interdisciplinary research needs at Virginia Tech. The testbed allows a diverse student and faculty population to learn, cooperate and innovate in science and technology across several disciplines. The educational activities include extending undergraduate and graduate classes at Virginia Tech with experimental hands on sessions that leverage the new testbed capabilities. The project focuses on three core thrusts: (a) Hardware upgrade, (b) Network/resource management upgrade (virtualization, computing clusters, better scheduling), (c) User software upgrade (preconfigured experiments & tutorials). The hardware upgrade adds 30 wide-band Ettus Research USRP X310 software defined radio (SDR) front ends (X310s) with 60 wide-band daughter boards and multiple antennas. A high performance computing cluster consisting of 30 multi-core servers to form a nontraditional shared baseband processing center. The distributed RF front ends are connected to the central computing cluster through a dedicated 10 Gbps Ethernet network that allows flexible association. Proposed software upgrades allow resource virtualization for efficient radio, computing and network resource sharing and better support for user and experiment management. One of the four indoor testbed floors will be equipped with 12 pairs of X310s that can be configured for MIMO operation or use as transceiver and monitor. Additional X310 pairs will be installed, one pair on each of the remaining three floors, and current hardware redeployed to support as many concurrent users and use case scenarios as possible. The configuration enables experimental investigation of spatial multiplexing, diversity, beam forming, and direction-finding techniques and related communication protocols. The monitoring configuration facilitates spectrum sharing research and education by providing real-time and identifiable spectra for each transmitter to be analyzed, logged, or displayed as needed to enable an experiment, tutorial, or contest. Basic tutorials will be developed to enable effective access and use of the testbed by a broad population of researchers and students at Virginia Tech.