CREW offers Open Access

CREW is in continuous Open Access phase to support your experiments free of charge!

Final public event & Globecom tutorial

CREW will present its final results at the Wireless Community event (Leuven, Belgium, 29 October 2015, more info) and organises a hands-on tutorial at Globecom (San Diego, USA, 10 December 2015, more info)

CREW PORTAL: access the CREW facilities

Interested in using the CREW facilities?
[Start here] - [Browse by name] - [Overview images] - [Advanced info] - [WTA GitHub].

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Testbed or cognitive componentsort icon Short description
IRIS

Iris is a software radio architecture that has been developed by the CTVR , built in C++, it is used for constructing complex radio structures and highly reconfigurable radio networks. Its primary research application is to conduct a wide range of dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio experiments. It is a GPP-based radio architecture and uses XML documents to describe the radio structure. This test bed will be highly beneficial when conducting cognitive radio experiments as it allows us to simulate a wide range of networks as well as giving us a highly flexible architecture to manipulate based on intelligent observations made about its surroundings.
Each radio is constructed from fundamental building blocks called components. Each component makes up a single process or calculation that is to be carried out by the radio. For instance, a component might perform the modulation on the signal or scale it by a certain amount. Each component supports one or more data type and passes dataset to other components along with some metadata such as a time stamp and sample rate. There is a data buffer between each component to ensure the data is safe, even if one component is processing data much faster than another
LOG-a-TEC

LOG-a-TEC is an outdoor experimental facility supporting cognitive radio networking experimentation in ISM and TV bands. The testbed consists of several clusters of wireless sensor nodes located in the municipality of Logatec, Slovenia and at the Jožef Stefan Institute campus. Clusters in the Logatec municipality cover approximately 350.000 m2 of public space that includes the city center and an industrial zone. Clusters at the JSI campus cover approximately 3000 m2 of in-door and out-door space. LOG-a-TEC is equipped with approximately 70 VESNA platforms and SNE-ISMTV reconfigurable radio boards.

The VESNA platform is a modular and fully flexible platform developed at the SensorLab at the Jožef Stefan Institute and is based on a high-performance microcontroller with ARM Cortex-M3. The SNE-ISMTV expansion permits experimentation in ISM 868 MHz, ISM 2.4 GHz and UHF 42 – 870 MHz frequency bands. Each node is also equipped with a 2 GB microSD card for storing predefined measurement configurations as well as measurement results. Each node is remote accessibile over the Internet via a wireless management network and a REST API.

The testbed can be operated remotely through the LOG-a-TEC web portal. The user can select a cluster of VESNAs and configure them to perform sensing and/or transmission. As a result, the testbed is able to support sensing only experiments, transmission only experiments and also transmission based on sensing results. The LOG-a-TEC web portal uses the GRASS-RaPlaT tool in order to (i) to provide the virtual experiment planning via simulation in order to ascertain the best setup before the actual execution in the testbed as well as (ii) to support the postprocessing and visualization of experimentation results.
LTE/LTE advanced testbed

Dresden’s LTE/LTE+ like testbed was set up in 2008 as part of the Easy-C project (www.easy-c.com).
The signal processing hardware includes Sorbas602 eNodeB Simulators, Sorbas202 Test UEs and Sorbas472 Radio Units, all supplied by Signalion (www.signalion.com). The eNBs and UEs are connected through IF interconnects with the radio unit frontend, which supports up to two Tx and two Rx channels for MIMO capability. The testbed operates in EUTRAN band VII (DL @ 2670-2690 MHz / UL @ 2550-2570 MHz) as well as near band I (DL @ 1980-2000 MHz / UL @ 2170-2190 MHz) with fixed bandwidth of 20 MHz and in FDD mode.
For the CREW project, two experimentation setups are available.

The indoor lab features 5 eNBs and 4 UEs. While the hardware is stationary itself, the Tx and Rx antennas can be positioned anywhere in the lab room. Further, 4 additional UEs are mounted on studio racks / carts and can be moved within the building. The approximate transmit power is 15 dBm.

The outdoor lab consists of two base station sectors that are fixed on two opposing corners of the faculty building (Figure 4), approx. 150 m apart. In addition to the mobile indoor UEs from setup 1, 3 rickshaw UEs are available for outdoor experiments in the vicinity of the building. The transmit power is approximately 30 dBm.
Sensing Engine

The imec sensing enigne is a prototype implementation of a sensing engine for mobile communication devices. The prototype consists of two main blocks: an analog RF front-end including analog to digital conversion and a DIgital Front-end For Sensing (DIFFS). For permanent deployment in the w-iLab.t testbed a WARP board is selected as analog RF front-end, covering the 2.4 and 5 GHz ISM bands. An in house developed flexibele SCAlable raDIO (SCALDIO) is also tested in a lab environment, covering an RF input range from 0.1 up to 6 GHz and a channel bandwidth up to 40 MHz. The digital front-end is an ASIP specifically designed for sensing operations, signal conditioning and synchronization. The chip contains a flexible filter block, including re-sampling and a SIMD core, extended with multiple accelerator cores. Multiple sensing algorithms are implemented on the system, ranging from straight-forward energy detection schemes, over more complex feature detection (for e.g. DVB-T) to multiband energy detection after FFT leakage removal for OFDMA LTE signals.
TWIST

The TKN Wireless Indoor Sensor Network Testbed (TWIST) is a multi-platform, hierarchical sensornetwork testbed architecture developed at the Technische Universität Berlin. One instance is currently deployed at TUB campus: a total of 204 sensor nodes (102 eyesIFX and 102 Tmote Sky nodes) are distributed in a 3D grid spanning 3 floors of an office building, resulting in more than 1500 m² of instrumented office space. Two nodes of each platform are deployed, while the larger ones (~28 m²) have four nodes. This setup results in a fairly regular grid deployment pattern with intra node distance of 3m. Within the rooms the sensor nodes are attached to the ceiling. The TWIST architecture introduces a layer of “super-nodes” (previous figure, right) between the sensor nodes and the testbed server, which manages sensor node reprogramming, configuration or accessing debug information over the serial connection. TWIST relies on COTS hardware and fully leverages the features of the USB 2.0 standard. The sensor nodes are connected to the super-nodes via USB hubs, which act as concentrators and also provide a power supply management capability. This enables active topology control and node fault injection modelling through selective powering on and off of nodes. TWIST is currently being extended by mobile robots which can be used for experiments that involve controlled mobility. At the end of CREW Year 1 (at the time of the first open call) one mobile robot can be used for local experiments.
w-iLab.t

The iMinds w-iLab.t allows flexible testing of the functionality and performance of wireless networking protocols and systems in a time-effective way. It provides remote access to hardware that can be remotely controlled and reconfigured, automated experiments can be scheduled, and experimental results can be collected, processed and visualised. Thanks to an in-house designed hardware control device, unique features of the testbed include the triggering of repeatable digital or analog I/O events at the sensor nodes, real-time monitoring of the power consumption, and battery capacity emulation.

The iMinds w-iLab.t has two setups the "w-iLab.t Office" and the "w-iLab.t Zwijnaarde" and it is part of the larger iLab.t facility.

The "w-iLab.t Office" consists of a wireless Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11a/b/g) and sensor network (IEEE 802.15.4) testbed infrastructure, deployed across three 90 m x 18 m floors of the iMinds office building in Ghent, Belgium. At 200 places throughout the office spaces, meeting rooms and corridors, wireless hardware is mounted to the ceiling. 

The "w-iLab.t Zwijnaarde" is equipped with 60 wireless nodes: IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, IEEE802.15.4, IEEE802.15.1 (Bluetooth) interfaces, software defined radio platforms (USRP) and spectrum scanning engines developed by imec. In addition, it offers mobile nodes to the experimenters. These mobile nodes feature the same equipment as the fixed ones, however they are mounted on Roomba vacuum cleaning robot. This facility is located in Zwijnaarde, Belgium, approximately 5 km away from the "w-iLab.t Office".

Please mail to pieter.becue AT intec.ugent.be if you want to run mobile experiments.