CI-ADDO-EN: Major Equipment Upgrade and Improved Operations Support for the ORBIT Open Access Wireless Networking Testbed

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The ORBIT open access testbed for next-generation wireless networking at Rutgers was developed to address the challenge of supporting realistic and reproducible wireless networking experiments at scale. The 400-node ORBIT radio grid was released as a community resource in 2005, and can be accessed by researchers via an Internet portal (www.orbit-lab.org) which provides a variety of services to assist users with experiment setup, control and measurement. This project is aimed at a major hardware upgrade of the computing equipment and measurement instruments which make up the ORBIT testbed. Specific equipment items being upgraded are: - All 400 ORBIT radio nodes which serve as the primary computing platform for experimenters. - Computing/storage servers and switching equipment in the ORBIT backend cluster. - RF measurement instruments for spectrum monitoring on the radio grid. This project also includes resources for ongoing maintenance and software support necessary for continued 24/7 operation of the ORBIT facility as a community resource. The proposed equipment upgrade will prepare ORBIT for anticipated higher performance experiments on emerging wireless technologies and network architectures. Specific areas of experimental research that will be enabled by the upgraded ORBIT testbed include dynamic spectrum access, cognitive networking, wireless security, delay-tolerant routing protocols and network virtualization. As an open community facility, ORBIT helps lower the barrier for experimentation on wireless networks, thus improving teaching and research productivity in the field. The testbed currently serves as an important platform for wireless aspects of future Internet architecture research in the NSF computer science and engineering communities.