A National Science Foundation-funded initiative has announced the general availability of a wireless testbed for network communications and unmanned aerial systems experimentation.
The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) Program Office said Tuesday that the Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) testbed is now available for drone flight demonstration and software-defined radio experiments in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The testbed comprises two fixed network nodes deployed at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus and a tower with a fixed node at Lake Wheeler Field Laboratory, along with two aerial-mounted nodes on custom drones and one mobile node on a ground-based rover.
“The AERPAW platform uniquely combines programmable wireless networking with custom drones to enable research into both airspace operations and wireless connectivity through 4G, 5G, and beyond,” said Ismail Guvenc, the testbed’s principal investigator and engineering professor at NC State.
The NSF-funded PAWR program, co-led by US Ignite and Northeastern University, also operates the POWDER testbed in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the COSMOS project in West Harlem, New York City.
It is working on a fourth testbed, dubbed ARA, in Ames, Iowa, for rural broadband connectivity.
