The CREW project federates testbeds at 5 different locations. The CREW federated platform will support the following functionalities:

• A common portal with a comprehensive description of the functionalities of the federated testbed and clear guidelines on how to access and use the federated testbed;
• The ability to ‘mix and match’ different aspects of different testbeds to help explore as wide a range of usage scenarios as possible.
• A benchmarking framework, enabling experiments under controlled/reproducible test conditions, offering universal & automated procedures for experiments and performance evaluation, allowing a fair comparison between different cognitive radio & cognitive networking concepts or between subsequent developments;
• Realistic data sets will be made available to the research community (as training data).
• Performance evaluation of external hardware under controlled test conditions.

What can be tested?

The CREW facilities and federation allows the experimental validation of cognitive radio & cognitive networking concepts for the following usage scenarios:

• Radio environment sensing for cognitive radio spectrum sharing: focus of this usage scenario is to match the federated sensing hardware, the XCVR API and novel sensing functionality.
• Horizontal resource sharing between heterogeneous networks in ISM band: this usage scenario will investigate techniques for advanced resource sharing in typical home/office/public building environments, densely populated with various wireless ISM band devices
• Cooperation in heterogeneous networks in licensed bands: this usage scenario will focus on cooperation in heterogeneous networks in licensed bands;
• Robust Cognitive Sensor Networks: the main objective of this usage scenario is the investigation of the robustness of cognitive radio solutions in cognitive Sensor Networks (CNSs) in order to achieve a certain QoS, while ensuring non-interference;
• Impact of cognitive networking in primary cellular Systems: this usage scenario will integrate sensing agents use in an LTE cellular environment, which operates as primary system.

Operation modes

The CREW platform offers 3 modes of operation:

• Mode 1: Individual CREW testbed usage: this mode offers the common CREW portal with clear and uniform information about access and usage of each testbed, usage scenarios, feedback on user experience & results.
• Mode 2: Single CREW heterogeneous testbed usage: this mode allows physically hosting of nodes from one testbed in another, hence creating new nodes from combinations of CREW hardware/software components.
• Mode 3: Multiple sequential CREW testbed usage: this mode enables the capturing of data/behaviours from one CREW testbed and replay for emulation or post-processing purposes on a second CREW testbed.