GRCon19 - UAS Community Testbed Architecture for Advanced Wireless Research with... by Vuk Marojevic

UAS Community Testbed Architecture for Advanced Wireless Research with Open-Source SDRs by Vuk Marojevic, Ismail Guvenc, Rudra Dutta, Mihail Sichitiu Enabling ubiquitous mobility and connectivity unleashes new applications and capabilities that will allow new technologies such as driverless cars, virtual and augmented reality, and massive Internet of things become reality. Major new use cases for advanced wireless technologies, once thought to be science fiction, are emerging in the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) spaces with opportunities in commercial, civil, government, and military sectors. While researchers have been analyzing and proposing a variety of new use cases for UAS, only a fraction of those are supported by experiments and service demonstrations, mostly in isolated setups. The safe integration of UAS into the national airspace requires more data and experiences using advanced wireless technologies with and without humans in the loop. We address this problem by envisioning and architecting a conceptual facility that we call aerial experimentation and research platform for advanced wireless, or AERPAW. AERPAW provides a blueprint for designing and operating a community research testbed that combines commercial wireless networking technologies with open-source software radios in production-like 3D mobility environments. We discuss the requirements, deployment challenges and solution alternatives, and the important role of the open-source SDR community for building and maintaining a wireless testbed in which mobile vehicles, in particular unmanned aerial vehicles, are the first-class citizens.