ARA Wireless Living Lab

Overview

As a part of the National Science Foundation Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program, ARA is a wireless living lab for smart and connected rural communities.

ARA focuses on the unique community, application, and economic context of rural regions, and it features the first-of-its-kind, real-world deployment of long-distance, high-capacity terrestrial wireless x-haul and access platforms as well as low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communications platforms across a rural area of over 500 square kilometers in central Iowa, centered around the Iowa State University. The high-capacity x-haul platforms operate at the 11 GHz, 14 GHz, 71-86 GHz, and 194 THz bands and offer communication capacities of up to 160 Gbps at per-hop distances up to 15+ km. The wireless access platforms feature 5G-and-beyond MIMO systems operating at the 460-776 MHz, 3.4-3.6 GHz, and 27.5-28.35 GHz bands and with 14, 192, and 384 antenna elements per sector respectively, and they offer up to 3+ Gbps wireless access throughput and up to 10+ km effective cell radius.

With both software-defined radios and programmable COTS systems and through effective orchestration of these wireless resources with fiber as well as compute resources embedded end-to-end across user equipment (UE), base stations (BS), edge, and cloud, ARA offers programmability, performance, robustness, and heterogeneity at the same time, thus enabling rural-focused co-evolution of wireless and applications while helping advance the frontiers of wireless systems in domains such as Open RAN, NextG, and agriculture applications. The resulting solutions hold the potential of reducing the rural broadband cost by a factor of 10 or more, thus making rural broadband as affordable as urban broadband.

For additional information about ARA, please check the ARA overview video, ARA technical documents, ARA-enabled research, and ARA community events.

ARA Deployment in Central Iowa

Aether in ARA

To advance the frontiers of 5G-and-beyond systems towards services such as ultra-reliable, low-latency communications for control and extended reality (XR) applications, a key focus of ARA is to support end-to-end, whole-stack open-source innovation in O-RAN and 5G/6G in general. To this end, Aether is a leading open-source platform that has been deployed in ARA. For instance, SD-RAN has been deployed in ARA as the near-RT RIC to support O-RAN experiments, and SD-Core has been deployed in ARA as the open-source 5G core for the state of the art massive MIMO gNB systems Ericsson AIR 6419 and AIR 5322. SD-Core has also been adopted by the ARA OTIC to serve as an open-source core for O-RAN testing and integration activities, for instance, those in the O-RAN Alliance Plugfests and the NTIA Innovation Fund project ACCoRD. The blueprints on deploying Aether and Aether-based experiments in ARA are expected to be made available around spring/summer 2025.