This paper profiles the features and functioning of the android phone controlled beagle-board-based Public Safety Cognitive Radio (PSCR) developed by the Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT) at Virginia Tech.
PSCR can configure itself to interoperate with any public safety waveform it finds during the scan procedure. It also offers users the capability to scan/classify both analog and digital waveforms. The current PSCR architecture can only run on a general purpose processor and hence is not deployable to the public safety personnel. In the first part of this thesis an Android based control application for the PSCR on a Beagle Board (BB) and the GUI for the control application are developed. The Beagle Board is a low-cost, fanless single board computer that unleashes laptop-like performance and expandability. The Android based Nexus One connected to the Beagle Board via USB is used to control the Beagle Board and enable operations like scan, classify, talk, gateway etc. In addition to the features that exist in the current PSCR a new feature that enables interoperation with P25 (CPFSK modulation) protocol-based radios is added. In this effort of porting the PSCR to Beagle Board my contributions are the following (i) communication protocol between the Beagle Board and the Nexus One (ii) PSCR control application on the Android based Nexus One (iii) detection/classification of P25 protocol-based radios. In the second part of this thesis, a prototype testbed of a Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) broker that uses the Beagle Board PSCR based sensor/classifier is developed. (Published abstract provided)