EAGER: A Feasibility Study for a Wide-Area WiMAX Infrastructure for Wireless Experimentation

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This project is evaluating the feasibility of an outdoor wireless experimentation facility that leverages WiMAX base stations and clients. WiMAX has been one of the candidate standards for 4G cellular networks, and is technologically fairly similar to the more popular 4G standards, namely LTE. The experimentation facility, if successful, will allow researchers (both local to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and external) to deploy new types of wireless services on them and experiment with them in a realistic manner. However, building such an experimental facility is a significant challenge due to various issues related to design, operations, maintainability, and usability. The goal of this project is to evaluate the feasibility and define one possible way to implement such an experimental infrastructure in the future. To create a preliminary prototype to evaluate feasibility, the researchers at UW-Madison are deploying a small number of commercial-grade wireless base stations at various outdoor locations in and around the university campus and beyond. The researchers are also deploying different client devices to test the functioning of the infrastructure to evaluate various strategies of acquiring users in the system. Furthermore, the project is also setting up appropriate network connectivity that can in the future provide suitable isolation between some of the more critical functions and the more experimental ones on the infrastructure. The project is being realized through an academia-industry partnership in the Madison area.