HCVP: A Hybrid Cognitive Validation Platform for WBAN

Cognitive Radio (CR) is widely anticipated to address spectrum scarcity and interference issues in future wireless communications. As a promising technology, many CR related studies have sprung up to improve the performance of network. However, most existing works mainly focus on theoretical analysis and software simulation without verifying feasibility and performance in practical network scenarios. In this paper, a Hybrid Cognitive Validation Platform (HCVP) is developed to realize practical situations by integrating computer software and hardware devices. Comparing with existing FPGA-based platforms, our HCVP is easier to deploy and configure, by replacing FPGA with low-power programmable SoC chips. Moreover, with excellent performance of energy efficiency, HCVP can be applied to a wide scope of applications, especially battery-powered networks. To evaluate the performance of the HCVP, we implement a WBAN scenario with same frequency interference traffic considered. An adaptive CR MAC algorithm is adopted to minimize the impact of interference. Experiments close to reality are built based on HCVP and the results show that the introduction of CR algorithm significantly alleviate the negative impact of collisions caused by interference and improve system performance.