The FIT/CorteXlab testbed (http://www.cortexlab.fr/) is an experimental platform developed by the french National Research Agency  specifically designed for Software Defined and Cognitive Radio research. With its 180m² EM shielded room that ensures reproducible experiments  and its 40 high-end SDR-capable radio nodes, CorteXlab provide a unique setup to experiment on new state of the art radio techniques, it is freely accessible via internet through a simple ssh connection. 

In this talk I will briefly mentioned the research topics of the Socrate Team 
(in charge of building and maintaining the platform), I will present the platform and some of the innovative experiments running on it. Then I will show how cognitive radio is an interesting applicative domain for cross-disciplinary research, requiring skills in digital communication, but also computer science,  embedded systems and FPGA  programming.