Current ARA Capabilities
ARA provides capabilities for researchers to perform advanced wireless experiments including RAN experiments and backhaul experiments. Experimenters can reserve the deployed resources (listed below) via the ARA portal and execute their experiments.
ARA Radio Access Networks
As far as RAN is concerned, ARA deploys:
USRP SDR-based Base Stations (BSes) and User Equipment (UEs)
Skylark BSes and Customer Premises Equipment (CPEs)
Ericsson BSes and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) UEs
ARA sandbox
SDR-capable Resources
Resource Type |
Count |
Components Used |
|---|---|---|
Base Station |
4 |
3 x USRP NI N320 at each BS |
User Equipment |
11 |
1 x USRP NI B210 |
ARA provides pre-built containers for performing experiments on USRP SDR platforms. Detailed specification of SDR devices can be found in Software Defined Radios. Refer to Experiments 1, 4, and 6 of the AraRAN experiments in the user manual for SDR-related experiments.
Skylark RAN Resources
Resource Type |
Count |
Components Used |
|---|---|---|
Base Station |
1 |
DU + CU + 3 RUs |
Customer Premises Equipment |
7 |
1 x Skylark Faros v2 |
The Skylark BS-CPE links are already established and users are provided with APIs only to measure different statistics from the system. Detailed specification of Skylark can be found here. The APIs are containerized and made available to the users via DockerHub. Refer to Experiments 2 and 3 of the AraRAN experiments in the user manual for Skylark-based mMIMO experiments.
Ericsson Resources
In addition to SDR and Skylark, ARA offers Ericsson BSes at four BS sites and COTS UEs in each UE. The following table summarizes the current Ericsson deployments in ARA.
Resource Type |
Count |
Components Used |
|---|---|---|
Ericsson Base Station |
4 |
n77 AIR6419 (midband) and n261 AIR5322 (mmWave) |
COTS UEs |
8 |
Quectel RG530F |
ARA Sandbox
ARA sandbox provides an indoor environment for performing RAN experiments. Detailed specification of NI B210 is described here. The components in the sandbox are listed in the following table. We include Experiment 5 under the AraRAN experiments in the user manual for an example experiment in the sandbox.
Resource Type |
Count |
Components Used |
|---|---|---|
SDR |
10 |
USRP NI B210 |
ARA X-Haul Networks
ARA deploys long-range, high capacity wireless link that connect between BS sites. In Phase-1, the backhaul is deployed between Wilson Hall and Agronomy Farm. A summary of the backhaul link is provided in the following table.
Resource Type |
Count |
Components Used |
Frequency of operation |
|---|---|---|---|
Backhaul link |
1 |
2 x Aviat 4800 |
Microwave (11 GHz) and millimeter wave (80 GHz) |
Similar to Skylark, we provide APIs for configuring the link attributes (such as bandwidth and modulation) and measuring the link characteristics. Refer to Experiment 1 of AraHaul Experiments for an example experiment of AraHaul.
ARA Compute and Edge Resources
For computationally intensive experiments, ARA offers compute and edge nodes. Similar to other resources, such nodes can be reserved and used with the help of containers. The list of compute resources enabled in ARA is summarized as follows:
Resource Type |
Count |
Site |
Components Used |
|---|---|---|---|
Compute Node |
2 |
Data Center |
Dell R750 Server |
Edge Node |
1 |
Agronomy Farm |
Dell R750 Server with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 |
ARA Weather Service
In order to enable weather-focused studies on the performance of communication systems, ARA offers a weather station service that provides users the information on the real-time weather conditions of the deployment sites. At present, we install generic weather stations (to sense the basic weather parameters including temperature, atmospheric pressure, rain rate, wind speed, wind direction, and humidity) as well as disdrometers (to sense fine-grained rain-related attributes including rain intensity, particle size distribution, and weather code). ARA provides Python-APIs for extracting the weather information for experiments. Users can use them as standalone programs or integrate the APIs in their experiment applications. More information on the weather related APIs can be found here.
Power Measurement Service
ARA offers APIs for users to extract the power consumption from base station sites to analyze the aspects of energy utilization. Such studies may help designing the future green communication systems. The power-related APIs follow the same style of weather APIs so that users can extract the power consumption as a whole from a BS site or from individual components at the site. More information on the power-related APIs can be found here.