FP7 CREW

December 2012

Dear subscriber,

In this issue of the CREW-project newsletter, we share the results of the second CREW open call for experimenters. In addition, we report on the experimenters of the CREW partners that joined after the first open call. Finally, we announce our CREW training days, which will be organized on February 19-20 2013 in Brussels, Belgium.

CREW-Open Call 2: results

The original planning of the CREW project included the organization of two competitive open calls for experimenters. After a successful first open call in 2011, we were happy to receive even more proposals as a result of a second open call. Although the quality of most of the 21 proposals was good to excellent, only 4 experiments could be selected for funding within the available budget.

The CREW project thanks all proposers for their efforts, and looks forward to working together with following new CREW-partners: the University of Thessaly (Greece) and NICTA-National ICT Australia (Australia), Instituto de Telecomunicações and CMSF-Sistemas de Informação (Portugal), CNIT/Universita di Palermo (Italy), and WINGS ICT Solutions (Greece). More details and statistics are available on the open call 2 results page.

Experiments of the first open call

Three experiments were selected after the first open call. The experiments are not finished yet, but below a very short status update is already provided.

University of Durham. A sensitivity experiment to characterise the performance of COTS and custom designed sensing engines was performed in the large anechoic chamber at Durham University. Both high end and low cost sensing engines that are available in the CREW federation, as well as the digital frequency swept channel sounder at Durham University were characterised using simple waveforms such as CW and more demanding signals such as frequency hopping. Sensing engines with direct down conversion techniques as well as swept techniques formed part of the experiment. The first results indicate that for some types of waveforms, even low cost sensing devices provide accurate results, but that only the high end devices perform well with all types of signals.

Technical University Ilmenau. The TUIL’s experiment aims at reducing the sensing latency of a software implementation of a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) based MAC protocol by integrating a dedicated spectrum sensing engine. The experiment benefits from two cognitive components from the CREW project: the Iris reconfigurable SDR developed at Trinity College Dublin and the IMEC sensing engine (SE). The SE is connected to the PC via USB and the parallel port and complements the USRP2 as radio transceiver. Preliminary results indicate a 50% reduction of the sensing delay compared to a fully based software implementation of the CSMA protocol.

Tecnalia Research & Innovation. TECNALIA's experiment focuses on assessing the performance of different data fusion algorithms applied to collaborative spectrum sensing. Hard-decision fusion algorithms will be compared to soft-decision ones (based on LSC techniques) and two different algorithms will be employed to compute the LSC coeficients: Genetic ones and Tecnalia's own Optimized Harmony Search one. So far, Thales Communications and Security "Transceiver Facility Implementation API" has been employed to controlled the sensing devices and data fusion algorithms have been implemented as Iris blocks.

CREW training days

On February 19-20 2013 in Brussels, the CREW project will organize hands-on training days for prospective experimenters that want to learn more about the capabilities of the CREW facilities and more specifically, on how to start using them. Although the two funded open calls that were planned from the start of the project are now completed and funding to carry out the experiments is no longer offered via the "traditional" CREW open call mechanism used for open call 1 and 2, it is still possible for additional experimenters to make use of the CREW facilities. A detailed agenda for the training days and more info on what CREW can mean for experimenters outside of the open calls will soon be shared on our website and in a next edition of this newsletter.