ARA Resource Specification
Resources in ARA are specified using the following three attributes:
Site: The location/site where the resource resides.
Resource Type: Represents the domain where the resource is used for. In ARA, the resources are classified into three types.
AraRAN: Access network resources.
AraHaul: Backhaul resources.
Compute: Compute resources.
Device Type: Indicates the type of device under each resource type. For example, AraRAN devices include Base Station and User Equipment.
Device ID: A 3-digit number representing the specific ID of a node.
We use the naming convention SITE-DEVICE-ID for ARA resources
where SITE represents the deployment site of the resource,
DEVICE is the type of device, and ID is a 3-digit identifier
to uniquely identify the device at a site. The specifications of
currently deployed fixed-location resources are provided in the
following table. All resources deployed at fixed locations are
available for users to perform their experimentation.
Resource Name |
Site |
Resource Type |
Device Type |
Site Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
DataCenter-Compute-[000-001] |
Data Center |
Compute |
Compute Node |
Data Center |
AgronomyFarm-Edge-000 |
Agronomy Farm |
Compute |
Edge Node |
Crop |
ResearchPark-Edge-000 |
Research Park |
Compute |
Edge Node |
Crop/Livestock |
WilsonHall-BS-000 |
Wilson Hall |
AraRAN |
Base Station |
City |
WilsonHall-Host-000 |
Wilson Hall |
AraHaul |
Aviat |
City |
AgronomyFarm-BS-000 |
Agronomy Farm |
AraRAN |
Base Station |
Crop |
AgronomyFarm-Host-000 |
Agronomy Farm |
AraHaul |
Aviat |
Crop |
CurtissFarm-BS-000 |
Curtiss Farm |
AraRAN |
Base Station |
Crop |
ResearchPark-BS-000 |
Research Park |
AraRAN |
Base Station |
Crop/Livestock |
Ames-UE-000 |
Ames |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
City |
CurtissFarm-UE-[000-002] |
Curtiss Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop |
KitchenFarm-UE-000 |
Kitchen Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop |
AgronomyFarm-UE-[000/001/010/020] |
Agronomy Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop |
SheepFarm-UE-000 |
Sheep Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Livestock |
DairyFarm-UE-000 |
Dairy Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Livestock |
BeefFarm-UE-000 |
Beef Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Livestock |
Sandbox |
AraRAN |
Host |
Laboratory |
Mobile User Equipment
ARA envisions to deploy mobile user equipment offering a platform for experimenters to carry out their research in the domain of communication involving mobility of nodes as well as for rural application use cases and research. For realizing mobile experiments, ARA deployed a couple of UEs in Phase-1, one on the bus operating as part of the public transportation systems (shown using the red icon in the deployment map below), and another on the vehicle involved in fire and safety services. As discussed in ARA Infrastructure, mobile UEs include three wireless technologies including SDRs (B210s), Skylark, and COTS (Quectel). At present, the mobile nodes are under testing phase and will be made available to the researchers once they are ready for reservation and use. The mobile UEs enable ARA users to perform experiments to study link connectivity patterns during mobility (i.e., the stability of links), behavior and modeling of wireless channels, UE handovers, signal coverage from base stations, and different modes of V2X communication, especially vehicle-to-infrastructure. In addition, the dataset generated from the experiments can be a valuable input for researchers in optimizing future wireless communication systems.
Besides the UEs enabling remote experimentation for wireless researchers, we deploy additional six mobile UEs (shown using blue icons in the deployment map below), specifically to serve different rural application use-cases. The six mobile nodes include: four on phenobots (agriculture robots), one on the John Deere tractor, and another on the Vermeer utility vehicle. The phenobots take stereoscopic photographs of plants, helping agriculture scientists on phenotyping process. ARA provides a communication platform for researchers to remotely control the phenobots as well as transferring the data collected from phenobots to their cloud repository. A demonstration of ARA-enabled phenobots can be found here. Similar to phenobots, the other two UEs serve the use-cases such as agricultural vehicle tracking and video streaming from the farmlands. Besides agriculture, ARA provides a communication platform for livestock farms (such as dairy farm and sheep farm) to stream the real-time videos to analyze the health and behavior of livestock. A demonstration of ARA-enabled video streaming from sheep farm can be found here.
A summary of the mobile UEs are provided in the following table.
Serial No. |
Resource Name |
Site |
Resource Type |
Device Type |
Site Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Ames-UE-120 |
Ames |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Transportation (Application/Experimentation) |
2 |
Phenobot-UE-000 |
Agronomy Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop (Application) |
3 |
Phenobot-UE-001 |
Agronomy Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop (Application) |
4 |
Phenobot-UE-002 |
Curtiss Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop (Application) |
5 |
Phenobot-UE-003 |
Agronomy Farm |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop (Application) |
6 |
DigitalAg-UE-000 |
Research Park |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop (Application) |
7 |
DigitalAg-UE-001 |
Research Park |
AraRAN |
User Equipment |
Crop (Application) |
The spatial distribution of ARA is shown in the following map. The yellow and green icons represent fixed BS and fixed UE sites, respectively. The red and blue icons represents approximate location of the mobile UEs.
Besides the outdoor deployment, ARA provides a sandbox for experimenters to test their experiments in a lab environment. Detailed specification of the sandbox service can be found in the ARA Sandbox Service page.
ARA Resource Technical Specification
AraRAN
As mentioned in ARA Infrastructure, AraRAN is equipped with different wireless technologies including Software Defined Radios, Massive MIMO, and COTS 5G solutions. Detailed specification of different AraRAN components are provided below.
Software Defined Radios
Base Station: The SDR BSes are realized using NI USRP N320 radios with operating frequency 3 MHz to 6 GHz with allowable instantaneous bandwidth of 200 MHz. The SDR supports standalone (embedded) or host-based (network streaming) operation. The master clock rates include 200, 245.76, and 250 MS/s. The SDR is equipped with Xilinx Zynq-7100 SoC Dual core ARM Cortex-A9@800 MHz and builtin GPSDO.
We use CommScope SS-65M-R2 4-port sector antenna with average gain of 18 dBi (4300-3600MHz).
The RF front-end operates on frequency band 3400-3600 MHz TDD with working bandwidth of 100 MHz. The maximum output power is 40 dBm and LNA gain of 25 dB. The automatic gain control is up to the given maximum output power.
User Equipment: The SDR UE is equipped with NI USRP B210, first fully integrated two channel USRP device with continuous RF coverage from 70 MHz - 6 GHz. It supports full duplex MIMO (2 Tx and 2 Rx) operation up to 56 MHz of real-time bandwidth (61.44 MS/s quadrature). The device supports GNU Radio and OpenBTS support through the open source USRP Hardware Driver (UHD). For advanced users, the SDR has open and reconfigurable Spartan 6 XC6SLX 150 FPGA.
We use 1 x Laird OC69421 direct mount omnidirectional antenna with gain of 5 dBi (3300-4200 MHz) and horizontal and vertical plane 3 dB bandwidth of 360 degrees and 100 degrees, respectively.
The RF front-end UE booster operates on the frequency band 3400-3600 MHz TDD with working bandwidth 100 MHz. The maximum output power is 30 dBm and LNA gain of 12 dB. The automatic gain control is up to the given maximum output power.
Skylark
Base Station: The base station consists of a Central Unit (CU), Distributed Unit (DU), and three Radio Units (RUs), one for each sector. Each RU has 7 radios and each radio is connected to a cross-polarized antenna having horizontal and vertical polarization. That is, each RU has 14x antennas per RU which makes a total of 42 antennas for three RUs at the BS covering 360 degrees cell area. The DU can support up to 6 RUs, making total antenna count of 84. However, we deployed 3 RUs in Phase-1. The RUs are powered via a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) and are connected to the DU via FDU.
Customer Premises Equipment (CPE): At present, six Skylark CPEs are deployed and 14 more CPEs are to be deployed in Phase-1. Each CPE has one radio that connects to a dual-polarized directional antenna. Omni directional antennas have been successfully tested with the CPE, however, the performance at long range is better for the directional antenna. Fixed UE nodes are equipped with directional antenna mounted on a pole while the mobile UEs use omni directional antenna.
Frequency of Operation: Skylark uses TV White Space (TVWS) band, i.e., 470–700 MHz, with target operating band 539- 593 MHz. Both the BS and CPEs need to tune to same frequency in order to establish a connection. The bandwidth supported by the BS is 40 MHz.
AraHaul
The wireless backhaul of ARA primarily consists of microwave and millimeter wave links and free space optical link.
Millimeter and Microwave Link
The long-range mmWave and microwave backhaul is realized using Aviat WTM 4800 radios. Major features of the platform are as follows:
- Carriers:
E-Band (80 GHz)
Bandwidth (MHz): 3.75, 5, 10, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 75, 80, and 100
Modulation: QPSK, 16QAM, 256QAM, 512QAM, 1024QAM, 2048QAM, and 4096QAM
Microwave (11 GHz)
Bandwidth (MHz): 250, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, and 2000
Modulation: QUARTER-QPSK, HALF-QPSK, QPSK, 16QAM, 256QAM, 512QAM, 1024QAM, 2048QAM, and 4096QAM
- Capacity: The dual transceiver design supports
Single channel E-band up to 10 Gbps
Dual channel multiband combining one E-band and one microwave channel aggregates up to 10 Gbps with or without adaptive dual carrier capacity.
Power Control: Fixed automatic transmitter power control (RTPC or ATPC)
Free Space Optical Link
The long-range Free Space Optical Communication (FSOC) link between base station sites operates with multiple channels in ITU grid at C-band to realize up to 160 Gbps transmission capacity. The optical backbone of the FSOC system consists of 16x10G dense wavelength-division-multiplexing transceivers. Lasers are further amplified by an Erbium-doped fiber amplifier. Major features of optical link are as follows:
Operating wavelength: 1537nm-1564nm, ITU grid
Bandwidth: 5GHz-80GHz
Data rate: 10Gbps-160Gbps
Maximum transmitter output power: 30dBm
Receiver sensitivity: -23dBm
Fiber coupling loss: 6dB
ARA Radio Frequency Allocation
The following table provides the spectrum used by each platform in ARA.
Radio Platform |
Frequency Band |
|---|---|
Software Defined Radio (SDR) |
3400 MHz - 3600 MHz |
Skylark/TVWS |
540 MHz - 570 MHz |
Ericsson |
3.45 GHz - 3.55 GHz, 27.5 GHz - 28.5 GHz |
Aviat |
11 GHz, 80 GHz |