PAWR Platform ARA: Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities

This award will fund the creation of an at-scale platform for advanced wireless research to be deployed across the Iowa State University (ISU) campus, City of Ames (where ISU resides), and surrounding research and producer farms as well as rural communities in central Iowa, spanning a rural area with diameter over 60km. The platform, called ARA: Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities, will address the rural broadband challenge by enabling the research and development of rural-focused wireless technologies that provide affordable, high-capacity connectivity to rural communities and industries such as agriculture. This project is part of the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program.

ARA aims to deploy advanced wireless platforms in real-world agriculture and rural settings, capturing the systems and environmental properties as well as the application and community contexts of rural broadband. For instance, ARA features the future of precision agriculture in both crop and livestock farms, involving automated ground vehicles as well as cameras and sensors.

The platform features unique wireless technologies ranging from low-UHF massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas to millimeter-Wave wireless access and long-distance backhaul, free-space optical, and low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communications, employing both software-defined-radio (SDR) and programmable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms, effectively leveraging open-source wireless software platforms such as OpenAirInterface, srsLTE, and others, with a contiguous coverage of hundreds of square miles of rural areas, ARA serves as an at-scale, deeply-programmable infrastructure for rural wireless research in real-world settings. Transforming the physical infrastructure into a research instrument supporting rigorous scientific studies and application trials, AraSoft, the software system of ARA, will enable reproducible, convenient experimentation and facilitates cross-discipline, cross-community collaborations.

The project team is led by researchers at Iowa State University along with researchers participating from University of California – Irvine, Ohio State University and International Computer Science Institute. With oversight from the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) Project Office, this team will design, deploy, operate, and sustain ARA as a revolutionary experimentation platform to support advanced research on rural broadband, 5G wireless systems and beyond.

Information on the access to this PAWR platform is available on https://www.advancedwireless.org. The project is also supported with funding from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.