CIRC: ENS/Grand: POWDER-ENS - Enhancing and Sustaining the POWDER Platform

The POWDER platform is a wireless “living laboratory”, in Salt Lake City, Utah, that enables research that accelerates the realization of new technologies, services and applications related to next generation (NextG) mobile networks. A “living laboratory” means that it is in the real world (with radios and other devices deployed across the University of Utah campus and parts of Salt Lake City), but at the same time is a laboratory where researchers can do experiments (do measurements, test new protocols and applications, etc.) One of the unique capabilities of the POWDER platform is that it is fully remotely accessible, which means that researchers from anywhere in the world can perform experiments on it.

POWDER’s most unique capabilities are its extensive over-the-air (OTA) operation in a real world environment, with a fully programmable end-to-end infrastructure, mobile endpoints and fully operational open-source NextG stacks. The POWDER-ENS project builds on the success of the POWDER platform by enhancing its capabilities to fit emerging technology trends and research interests.

POWDER-ENS specifically focuses on providing capabilities to support research in the emerging area of Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN or O-RAN), developing tools and datasets to enable mobile and wireless research, and developing tools, workflows and end-to-end use cases related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in mobile and wireless research.

The importance of mobile and wireless services and technologies to society as a whole cannot be overstated. The research enabled by the project will result in new services and applications over NextG networks with the potential to bring enormous benefits to society. Mobile and wireless related skill sets, knowhow and innovation are critically important from US economic and national security perspectives.

The project contributes to this, not only in the research it enables, but notably, through its remote access capabilities, in “democratizing” access to sophisticated research infrastructure and thus broadening research and workforce development alike. Broadening access to sophisticated research facilities provided by POWDER and enabling training in the inherently cross-disciplinary mobile and wireless domain are key objectives for the project.

The POWDER portal website and platform portal can be accessed at: https://www.powderwireless.net/ The website provides general information about the facility, hardware and software capabilities available on the platform, pointers to datasets created on the platform, news about project and platform activities and more.

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.