Monitoring AraMIMO Wireless Link Behavior

Platform: Skylark Wireless

Resources needed: Central Unit (CU), Distributed Unit (DU), Radio Unit (RU), and a Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)/User Equipment (UE)

Short Description: The experiment is designed to monitor wireless link parameters of the AraMIMO deployment.

Detailed Description: AraMIMO consists of multiple CPEs connected to the Base Station (BS) which is a Skylark Wireless Faros V2 equipment. With this experiment, we can launch a container equipped with APIs to interact with Skylark CU and measure real-time link utilization and performance-related metrics on the Skylark platform. The figure below shows the detailed network and experient diagram.

Detailed Steps

Login to the portal portal.arawireless.org with your username and password. Please go through the Hello World example on how to login to portal, create a lease, launch a container, assign a floating IP address and accessing the container (or make sure you have already run that experiment successfully and are familiar with using the experiment portal).

Note

If you are a first time user, it is highly recommended to run the Hello World experiment first to get familiarized with the interface and portal.
Create a reservation using the Project -> Reservations -> Leases tab from the dashboard.
Click on create Lease and write the Lease Name e.g. skylark_mimo_1 and click Next.

Select the resource attributes. There are four BS sites available for experimentation. The following table shows the resource attributes for the four BS sites and how to reserve them:

Skylark BS Resource Reservations Table

Resource No.	Site	Resource Type	Device Type
1	Wilson Hall	AraRAN	Skylark Base Station
2	Boone	AraRAN	Skylark Base Station
3	Gilbert	AraRAN	Skylark Base Station
4	ISICS	AraRAN	Skylark Base Station

Launch a container equipped with APIs using the container image arawirelesshub/aramimo:v1.1
Once the container is launched, take a note on the floating IP if you want to access the container from your PC via ARA jumpbox.
The containers can be accessed via the Console tab of the respective containers in the Project -> Containers tab.
To SSH to the container using floating IP, ssh needs to enabled in the container. In Console, run the following command
```
# service ssh start
```
Set the password for root by typing the following command and then set the password
```
# passwd
```
Now the container can be accessed both from the dashboard Console or using ssh from the jumpbox server.
To ssh to the container, use the floating IP that is reserved for the container with root as username and password that is set in previous step. Visit ARA Jumpbox for more information on accessing containers via jumpbox.
In the container, Run the following command to launch the CLI.
```
# ara-sklk-cli
```
Run the following command to get the number of CPEs connected, SNR, and the average MCS. The information provides an idea about current system performance. In the following screenshot, 4 UEs are connected
```
> get_ue_stats
```
For getting the Skylark UE ID and corresponding location, execute the following command.
```
> get_ue_locations
```
To get weather data, execute the following by speecifying the sitename. Sitename could be WilsonHall, AgronomyFarm (or all for both sites). For example following command will show the weather data for Wilson Hall.
```
> get_weather_data -s WilsonHall
```

Type `help -v` to show all the commands that can be run to extract wireless link data such as SNR, throughput etc. Here are the list of commands that can be run.

alias                 Manage aliases
get_center_freq       Return Center Frequency on all Radios
get_config            Return Current BS Configuration
get_connected_ues     Returns all the connected ues
get_csi_data          Returns csi data
get_grouping_info     Returns detailed grouping info at each band
get_main_stats        Returns detailed statistics of the system
get_mcs               Print average MCS Index for UE's
get_phy_config        Print Phy Configuration Parameters
get_phy_enabled       Check if Phy is Enabled and BS Transmitting
get_snr               Print Connected UE's SNR
get_ue_bus_rates      Print Bus Rates in Mbps
get_ue_data_rates     Print Data Rates in Mbps
get_ue_locations      Returns the locations of ues
get_ue_stats          Print Connected UE's Statistics
get_weather_data      Return Weather Data for Wilson Hall and Agronomy Farm
help                  List available commands or provide detailed help for a specific command
history               View, run, edit, save, or clear previously entered commands
quit                  Exit this application
run_pyscript          Run a Python script file inside the console
shell                 Execute a command as if at the OS prompt

This container contains the AraMIMO Repo on Gitlab which contains other useful scripts along with documentation. The AraMIMO API is documented in the user manual.
If you need to collect data, there are multiple example scripts in the aramimo repo. e.g. to capture capacity, SNR, MCS, for each UE, run the kpi_data_script by providing the number of iterations. It will collect the data for the number of iterations (seconds) and save as json file. The following will capture the data for 60 seconds. Exit from the CLI and go into aramimo repo and then run the following command:
```
cd aramimo
python3 kpi_data_script.py 60
```
Note

You must first exit out of the ara-sklk-cli to access and run the scripts in the aramimo repo.
Similarly, the latency_script, group_summary_script, ue_stats_script and csi_capture_script will collect the latency, grouping, UE received power and CSI data respectively. All files take number of iterations to by passed as an argument except csi_capture_script which requires number of seconds as input. Note that the number of seconds can not be greater than 100. Each file has instructions on how to run the script written in comments at the top of the file.
sklk_measurement_script is more comprehensive and when run it will run the above scripts in different threads to collect all data at the same time. To run the sklk_measurement_script provide repititions and seconds (for CSI) as arguments.
```
python3 sklk_measurement_script.py 30 10
```

Tip

If you want to perform weather measurements along with the AraRAN experiments, refer to ARA Weather APIs.