FP7 CREW

March 2012

Dear subscriber,

The FP7-CREW (Cognitive Research Experimentation World) project is now well into its second year. In this issue of the CREW newsletter, you will find statistics on last year's open call for experimenters, an overview of the new CREW partners that temporary join the project as a result the open call and their experiments, and an introduction to the new CREW testbed in Slovenia. In the meantime, the CREW partners keep improving their facilities to support your experiments, that could be funded after a second open call that will be announced in the coming months.

Results of open call 1

The CREW project received 18 proposals for the first open call for experimenters. Although most proposals came from universities and research institutes, there was also an interest from industry and from a governmental department. The total requested funding was EUR 2156352, resulting in a budget oversubscription factor of 5.39. Although we received a high number of high quality proposals, due to the limited budget only three proposals for experiments could be accepted. A summary of their planned experiments is found below. For more statistics, please visit the CREW open call 1 results page.

Tecnalia Research & Innovation. Goal of the experiment: to assess the benefits of optimized linear collaborative multiband spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks with respect to hard-decision based fusion schemes and to its non-optimized counterpart.

University of Durham. Goal of the experiment: to characterize the performance of sensing engines in the CREW federation in controlled environments and to compare low end COTS, high end COTS and custom designed units. The experiment will also study the effects of multipath and shadowing in two sites representative of static and dynamic environments.

Ilmenau University of Technology. Goal of the experiment: to evaluate contention-based communication protocols such as the CSMA MAC protocol using two cognitive components from the CREW project: the imec sensing engine and the Iris reconfigurable SDR framework.

The JSI testbed

Our Slovenian partner Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI) became a full member of the CREW project in July 2011. Since JSI joined the project at a later stage, its testbed did not take part in the first open call. In the meantime, JSI continued with the developments and by the time of the second open call it will be fully integrated in the CREW federation. The JSI testbed is an outdoor testbed deployed in the city of Logatec, as part of a LOG-a-TEC experimental wireless sensor network (WSN) testbed. The core of the LOG-a-TEC testbed consists of VESNA sensor nodes mounted on public lighting infrastructure. The sensor nodes on light poles are currently being equipped with different transmitting and spectrum sensing capabilities in ISM and VHF/UHF frequency bands. The nodes can be remotely reprogrammed, reconfigured and (re)clustered according to the needs of the investigated use case.

For the execution of experiments that require advanced spectrum sensing capabilities, as well as to support and provide an in-the-field reference, USRP modules are being deployed on fixed locations. Finally, fixed VESNA nodes that act as transmitters or receivers in the ISM frequency bands or as receivers in the VHF/UHF frequency bands, will be complemented with a portable integrated USRP-VESNA module, representing a secondary user CR enabled terminals.

Further information will soon be available on the CREW portal and at the JSI sensorlab site.

Other news

Recently, new deliverables were added to the documents section of the CREW website. We look also forward to meeting you at an upcoming conference or event.

Best regards,
The CREW project