PAWR Program Unveils ARA Testbed for Rural Wireless and Applications Research

The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) Project Office unveils the ARA, a new testbed in Central Iowa dedicated to research on rural wireless systems and applications. The ARA combines both commercial and programmable network systems. The multi-modal platform is based on the Iowa State University (ISU) campus with coverage extending to local crop and livestock farms and parts of the City of Ames (IA). The ARA platform uniquely combines several types of technologies in both the backhaul and radio access portions of the network from Aviat, Skylark Wireless, NI, and Ericsson. For backhaul connectivity, ARA uses Aviat radios operating in the 11 GHz and 80 GHz bands. The testbed also maintains fiber connections as a backup. In the radio access network, the ARA team has partnered with Skylark Wireless in developing and deploying production-grade, many-antenna MIMO systems with research APIs for communications using TV White Space (TVWS) spectrum, and it has deployed software-defined radios from NI using mid-band connectivity.