A Femtocell-based Testbed Design for Evaluating 3G Cellular Networks

While the demand for the performance evaluation of proposals using real hardware is ever increasing, the lineup of wireless testbeds focuses on IEEE 802.11-based WLAN, and lacks cellular communication environments despite of their popularity. We argue that research community needs a wireless testbed targeted on cellular technologies. To this end, this paper proposes a novel wireless testbed, dubbed Cell-Lab, which is developed to evaluate a wide spectrum of proposals in cellular environments. Cell-Lab resolves a cost problem, which is a decisive barrier to the deployment of cellular network testbed, by adopting a low-cost femtocell base station instead of conventional one. To support both virtualization and programmability as basic features, we integrate all the cellular network entities into a femtocell base station, and introduce a separate controller that performs virtualization and controls a femtocell base station. By means of Cell-Lab, researchers will be able to experiment their proposals under realistic cellular network conditions.. INTRODUCTIONช A recent trend in the networking research area is the increasing demand on the performance evaluation of proposals by real prototypes or testbeds. That is, we need to run proposals on network testbeds for realistic evaluation. Ther