II-NEW: WiNEST: A Prototype for a City-scale "Living Laboratory" for Wide-area Wireless Experimentation

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This project is building a city-scale experimental testbed, called WiNEST,comprised of cellular basestations, WiFi access points, and various static and mobile usage scenarios with wireless connectivity. The testbed spans a part of downtown Madison, Wisconsin, and beyond and allows for interesting new applications over a large coverage area. The infrastructure provides a sandbox in which researchers can prototype new ideas of wireless systems with unprecedented speed and responsiveness. It also supports experiments in emerging mobile applications, such as virtual-reality video streaming, intelligent transportation and Internet-of-Things. WiNEST is an academia-industry-government partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a local data center and ISP in Madison, and the city where each partner is providing different resources to enable this infrastructure. WiNEST has many new avenues of research and educational impact, including: (i) engages with a large community --- potentially all of UW-Madison students, staff, and faculty, city of Madison agencies, including public safety organizations, and Madison Metro Transit system buses; (ii) creates unique synergies between local academic institutions and technology partners; (iii) disseminates all key platform components of WiNEST through its public portals; (iv) supports a laboratory-oriented curriculum at the university for engaging undergraduate and graduate students through hands-on experience. The goal of this project is to create a preliminary prototype for a unique city-scale "living laboratory" for wide-area wireless experimentation, called WiNEST. WiNEST will be the first-of-its-kind outdoor testbed and infrastructure that allows researchers, local and remote, to run wide-area wireless experiments at moderate to large-scale. It combines commercial-grade 3G/4G cellular base stations backed with OpenFlow switches, uniquely programmable and sliceable WiFi hotspots that are backhauled via the cellular base stations, along with mobile and static usage scenarios. It leverages prior efforts of the PI in assembling significant experimental wireless infrastructure for conducting research, integrates them with real usage scenarios across the the greater Madison area. WiNEST is an academia-industry-government partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a local data center and ISP in Madison, and the city where each partner is providing different resources to enable this infrastructure. Experimenters using WiNEST have a unique opportunity to deploy their new services and experiments at scale. They have deeper programmability inside the network (in client devices, at the edges, and in certain parts of the core) and they will also have the advantage of operating with real users. WiNEST enables diverse types of experiments ranging from mobility strategies, handoffs, multi-path systems, edge/fog computing and the Internet of Things applications.