MRI: Development of a National University Wireless Testbed: Rice Configurable Baseband Architecture

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project, developing a Distributed National University Wireless Testbed in cooperation with multi-disciplinary multi-university teams from UCLA, U Mass, and Ohio State, promotes the sharing of resources and expertise among various universities. The work leads towards a national experimentation infrastructure that can serve the wireless communication research and engineering community. The infrastructure enhances the existing local wireless testbed at Rice, contributing to the development of a distributed wireless testbed, and enabling researchers to access a wireless testbed in different remote university sites through web interfaces. The platform, intended to serve as a flexible, programmable, and publicly available testbed, provides a seamless integration of experiments with theory, supporting the following research activities: Reconfigurable Wireless Architectures, High Data Rate Communication, and QoS Scheduling and Modeling for Dense Wireless Networks. The web-enabled testbed allows researchers to test, validate, and design RF, baseband, VLSI, and networking components of future systems. At Rice, the research platform will be composed of programmable and configurable multiple antenna wireless communication transceivers based in high speed baseband processors, RF transmitters and receivers, channel emulators, and a programmable RF switching matrix. Providing students a more well rounded education, this experimental communication research offers a distinct advantage over a more traditional academic/theoretical research environment. The distributed research and educational platform will also be utilized for outreach activities, both on campus and via the web interface.