NYU-Poly wireless testbed Wiki

=Welcome to the Wireless@NYU Testbed Wiki=

With the rapid uptake smart phones, tablets and mobile applications, cellular wireless networks are now facing a "data crunch" with data demand approximately doubling each year. To address this demand, new network architectures and wireless technologies will be needed to scale capacity at dramatically lower cost per bit. Sundeep Rangan's' lab at the wireless@nyu center is developing new technologies for ultra low-cost, self-organizing cellular networks.

This wiki page describes two testbeds we are developing to validate our research ideas, and bring theoretical concepts to practice. Our goal is to build an experimental platform capable of simulating and expanding upon the latest cellular technologies such as 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE). Although we have just started this wiki page, we hope that it will provide demonstrations of our research as well as information for students and researchers interested in working in this testbed.

= Testbeds = Our lab is developing two testbeds for this project:

Real-Time Emulation with HPC
Our first testbed is a high performance computing (HPC) cluster for real-time emulation of medium size cellular networks. The physical layer is modeled in computer simulation using standard industry models, while the MAC and upper layers run "as is." The network is simulated in real-time with a widely-used open source ns3 network simulator modified for multithreading across multiple cores to enable the simulation to run in real-time. For this purpose, our lab has built a small cluster from generic Linux machines connected via an Infiniband switch. Real application can natively "plug into" the simulation to test actual application and transport layer protocols. The simulator thus enables "software in the loop" simulation with the configurability and scalability of network simulators and application and MAC-layer accuracy of physical testbeds.

Read more on our ns3 Real-Time Wireless Emulation.

National Instruments Testbed
Smaller, more detailed simulations can be performed on a testbed supplied by National Instruments. National Instruments has supplied our lab with two PXI chassis with modules for RF, baseband and real-time network layer processing. We are intending to develop a simplified version of a 3GPP LTE system that can be easily modified for MAC and network layer algorithmic experimentation. The LTE modules will be based on National Instruments LTE physical layer as well as FPGA IP cores licensed to NYU-Poly by donation from Xilinx. The system has sufficient capabilities to simulate two base stations and two mobiles, each with 10 MHz and 2x2 antennas.

Read more on the National Instruments Testbed.

= Sponsors = The testbed would not be possible without the support of Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology, National Instruments and NSF grant 1116589.