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].

Open call 1 - results

Selection procedure

The first open call closed on October 19, 2011 at 17:00 Brussels time. The CREW project received 18 proposals, (co-)submitted by 24 proposers.

Although most proposals were sent by universities and research institutes, we also received 2 proposals from industry and 1 from a governmental department.

Proposals were received from Spain, Germany, Brazil, Greece, India, Italy, UK, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Sweden. Some statistics on the budget are found below:

  • Total request for funding: EUR 2 156 352 (oversubscription factor: 5.39)
  • minimum requested funding per proposal: EUR 53 809
  • maximum requested funding per proposal: EUR 192 014
  • average requested funding per proposal: EUR 119 797

We received a high number of good quality proposals. However, due to the limited budget,  only three proposers, those that were ranked highest after a thorough review process by external independent reviewers, will receive funding as a result of the first CREW open call:

  1. Tecnalia Research & Innovation
  2. University of Durham
  3. Ilmenau University of Technology

The CREW project thanks all proposers for their efforts. We want to congratulate the three selected partners again for becoming partners of the CREW project and for perfectly completing their nice experiments!

The final results of these experiments are explained briefly in the videos below, alongside their testimonials about their conducted experiments.

 

 

Experiment by Tecnalia Research & Innovation

Title: Collaborative spectrum sensing

What is the most striking output from the experiment?
  • Collaborative spectrum sensing is needed in order to draw the spectrum occupation map in a reliable way. 
  • The  data fusion solution based in a Linear Statistical Combination with Harmony Search optimization clearly outperforms the other tested ones.
 
Did the experiment meet your expectations? 
Yes, the obtained results have proved us right in our initial hypothesis for the data fusion solution.
 
Can you identify research gaps that must be addressed to further optimise the solution? 
  • Further experimentation in an outdoor scenario are needed in order to answer the following questions:
    • How many sensors per square meter are needed for an optimal sensing?
    • How must be they (the sensors) deployed?
    • How long should the scan period be?
  • An appropriate mechanism for accessing the sensing network must be designed, i.e. how is the communication between the sensors and the decision node achieved? 
  • How is the information in the data base stored? In which format?
 
How did CREW help you?
Participation in the project has been extremely interesting and fruitful for Tecnalia. First of all, it has provided a great opportunity to test and validate some of Tecnalia’s advanced cognitive radio technical developments, which was extremely difficult without CREW. CREW has given access to advanced cognitive components like the Transceiver Facility Implementation API from Thales and the Iris reconfigurable Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform in a single set-up. Additionally, it has allowed Tecnalia to learn great lessons about testbed usage.
 
 

Experiment by University of Durham

Title: Device sensitivity and environment measurements

What is the most striking output from the experiment?

The digital swept method is a viable solution to sensing. The direct down conversion quadrature method did not seem to have an advantage in sensing compared to the digital swept method. The latter seemed to offer a bandwidth advantage over the quadrature method with current ADC technology.
 
Did the experiment meet your expectations?
Yes we now have a considerable data base and system that is capable of sensing and channel measurements.
 
Can you identify research gaps that must be addressed to further optimise the solution?
A great deal is yet to be done such as distributive sensing with high end devices.
 
How did CREW help you?
Thanks to CREW, the University of Durham was able to calibrate diverse spectrum sensing hardware in different physical environments (different individual test facilities of the CREW federation). The measurements performed by the University of Durham permitted the facilities to have a better understanding of the wireless propagation properties of different physical environments, which may be beneficial for future experiments.
 
 

Experiment by Ilmenau University of Technology

Title: CCA agent in a CSMA MAC using Iris

What is the most striking output from the experiment?
Even having a hardware-assisted CCA mechanism only (this is, the sensing engine) helps in mitigating the negative effects for random-access MAC of purely software-defined radios.
 
Did the experiment meet your expectations? 
Yes, the experiments met our expectations. 
 
Can you identify research gaps that must be addressed to further optimise the solution? 
  • The overall issue of random-access MAC implementation on state-of-the-art SDR hardware (i.e. USRP) still remains pretty much open. So this could be interesting. 
  • Further integration of spectrum sensing for detection of other users including ourselves and possibly other techniques on the same frequency band.
 
How did CREW help you?
Thanks to CREW, the Technische Universität Ilmenau could have access to state-of-the-art spectrum sensing equipment (imec sensing engine). The new coupling scheme between imec sensing engine and Iris reconfigurable SDR developed by the Technische Universität Ilmenau is now available at the iMinds facilities (w-iLab.t) for use by other experimenters.