Design and implementation of ARA wireless living lab for rural broadband and applications

Abstract

Addressing the broadband gap between rural and urban regions requires rural-focused wireless research and innovation. In the meantime, rural regions provide rich, diverse use cases of advanced wireless, and they offer unique real-world settings for piloting applications that advance the frontiers of wireless systems (e.g., teleoperation of ground and aerial vehicles). To fill the broadband gap and to leverage the unique opportunities that rural regions provide for piloting advanced wireless applications, we design and implement the ARA wireless living lab for research and innovation in rural wireless systems and their applications in precision agriculture, community services, and so on. ARA focuses on the unique community, application, and economic context of rural regions, and it features the first-of-its-kind, real-world deployment of long-distance, high-capacity terrestrial wireless x-haul and access platforms as well as Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite communications platforms across a rural area of diameter over 30 km. The high-capacity x-haul platforms operate at the 11 GHz, 14 GHz, 71–86 GHz, and 194 THz bands and offer communication capacities of up to 160 Gbps at per-hop distances up to 15+ km. The wireless access platforms feature 5G-and-beyond MIMO systems operating at the 460–776 MHz, 3.4–3.6 GHz, and 27.5–28.35 GHz bands and with 14, 192, and 384 antenna elements per sector respectively, and they offer up to 3+ Gbps wireless access throughput and up to 10+ km effective cell radius. With both software-defined radios and programmable COTS systems, and through effective orchestration of these wireless resources with fiber as well as compute resources embedded end-to-end across User Equipment (UE), Base Stations (BS), edge, and cloud, including support for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), ARA offers programmability, performance, robustness, and heterogeneity at the same time, thus enabling rural-focused co-evolution of wireless and applications while helping advance the frontiers of wireless systems in domains such as Open RAN, NextG, and agriculture applications. The resulting solutions hold the potential of reducing the rural broadband cost by a factor of 10 or more, thus making rural broadband as affordable as urban broadband. Here we present the design principles and implementation strategies of ARA, characterize its performance and heterogeneity, and highlight example wireless and application experiments uniquely enabled by ARA.