Design and Implementation of ARA Wireless Living Lab for Rural Broadband and Applications
Taimoor Ul Islam, Joshua Ofori Boateng, Md Nadim, Guoying Zu, Mukaram Shahid, Xun Li, Tianyi Zhang, Salil Reddy, Wei Xu, Ataberk Atalar, Vincent Lee, Yung-Fu Chen, Evan Gosling, Elisabeth Permatasari, Christ Somiah, Owen Perrin, Zhibo Meng, Reshal Afzal, Sarath Babu, Mohammed Soliman, Ali Hussain, Daji Qiao, Mai Zheng, Ozdal Boyraz, Yong Guan, Anish Arora, Mohamed Y. Selim, Arsalan Ahmad, Myra B. Cohen, Mike Luby, Ranveer Chandra, James Gross, Kate Keahey, Hongwei Zhang
TL;DR
ARA addresses the rural broadband gap by establishing a first-of-its-kind wireless living lab deployed over a real-world rural area (>30 km in diameter) that integrates long-distance x-haul, high-capacity RAN, and LEO backhaul with end-to-end compute and BYOD support. The approach combines SDR-based UEs and mature COTS platforms governed by an OpenStack/Docker-based software stack (AraSoft) with a three-tier device-edge-cloud architecture for reproducible experimentation and spectrum governance via Wireless Guard. The work demonstrates capabilities across TVWS massive MIMO, O-RAN/open-source NextG, NTN, and FSOC, and provides rich measurement APIs for channel, weather, and energy metrics, enabling co-evolution of wireless technologies and rural applications such as precision agriculture. The results suggest significant potential for reducing rural broadband costs, accelerating rural innovation, and fostering an open community of researchers capable of conducting end-to-end, reproducible experiments in real-world rural settings.
Abstract
Addressing the broadband gap between rural and urban regions requires rural-focused wireless research and innovation. In the meantime, rural regions provide rich, diverse use cases of advanced wireless, and they offer unique real-world settings for piloting applications that advance the frontiers of wireless systems (e.g., teleoperation of ground and aerial vehicles). To fill the broadband gap and to leverage the unique opportunities that rural regions provide for piloting advanced wireless applications, we design and implement the ARA wireless living lab for research and innovation in rural wireless systems and their applications in precision agriculture, community services, and so on. 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 diameter over 30 km. 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, including support for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), 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.