RENEW (Reconfigurable Eco-system for Next-generation End-to-end Wireless)

RENEW Features The RENEW project will develop world’s first fully programmable and observable wireless radio network. With RENEW, wireless research and development community will be able to test diverse ideas and concepts, ranging from low-level hardware to all the way to novel applications. The project will support many firsts, like Programmable wide-band radios, including 5G bands of 2.5 and 3.5 GHz Large-scale MIMO, including massive MIMO Novel PHY and network stacks, including 5G-like and WiFi-like protocol stacks Observable at all layers of the protocol stack Use of distributed computational resources throughout the infrastructure RENEW is a partnership of Rice University, University of Michigan and Texas Southern University. The RENEW team will leverage extensive past experience, namely Rice WARP (founded in 2006, PI Sabharwal), a high-performance open-source SDR platform that has been used by 450+ research papers as of November 2017. Rice TFA wireless (founded 2006, PI Knightly) that is one of the largest free wireless network, in an under-resourced community, operational for more than a decade. Rice Argos (founded in 2010, PI Zhong), developed the world’s first massive MIMO programmable platform. UMich Mobilab (founded in 2011, PI Mao), has developed some of the most widely used mobile measurement toolkits. TSU VR-Lab (PI Chen), has developed world’s open-source teaching labs for conducting experiments with physical objects, like robotic agents. Project Timeline April 2019 DEPLOYMENT 64-Antenna Base Station on POWDER with multiple fixed end-points. May 2019 POWDER-RENEW INTEGRATION Full Integration RENEWLab with capability to experiment over-the air with multiple design flows. April 2020 DEPLOYMENT Additional base stations with multi-cell synchronization capabilities on POWDER. May 2020 POWDER-RENEW INTEGRATION Configurable Realtime Massive MIMO PHY experimentation capability. April 2021 DEPLOYMENT Addition of Mobile Clients on shuttle buses on POWDER. May 2021 POWDER-RENEW INTEGRATION Full Stack experimentation capability with mobile and fixed clients: MAC Scheduler, CoMP, Core Network, Mobility. Supported by