Enabling cognitive-radio paradigm on commercial off-the-shelf 802.11 hardware

Cognitive Radio paradigm (CR) is recognized as key enabler for next generation wireless networking: accessing the limited radio spectrum in an opportunistic manner allows secondary users to boost their transmission performance without interfering with existing primary 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 solutions, 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 architecture 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 configuring 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 extensive testing of the CR paradigm.