Holiday greetings from ARA

[Zhang, Hongwei [E CPE]]

Dear ARA Community,

 

Merry Christmas!

 

At this time of celebration, reflection, and planning, I am writing to share a few updates on ARA:

• Since AraFest’24 in late August, the ARA team has been making great progress in integrating the three new Phase-2 base station sites, 15+ UE stations, as well distrometers, expanding the ARA footprint to be more than 500 square kilometers in Central Iowa. These infrastructures will soon be made available to the ARA community to enable new experiments that would be infeasible otherwise, with select examples as follows:
• Significant progress has been made to operationalize the long-distance, terrestrial free-space optical communication link, and it has recently achieved a throughput over 2.5 Gbps; we expect to have this link available for community use soon after further refinement.
• With the six newly added AraHaul links, ARA enables long-distance, high-capacity wireless x-haul research at 11 GHz, 80 GHz, and 194 THz bands.
• With four low-UHF massive MIMO base station sites integrated, multi-cell massive MIMO experiments will be enabled soon.
• New O-RAN experiments will be released to support experiments with additional RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) such as SD-RAN, OSC RICs, as well as associated xApps and rApps.
• We are in the final stage of integrating the Ericsson massive MIMO and mmWave base stations with open-source 5G cores such as SD-CORE and free5GC. This further opens up the COTS 5G platforms in ARA and expects to support exciting 5G research across RAN and core.
• We have made available, via https://arawireless.org/tech-docs,  new documents on ARA design and implementation as well as new ARA capabilities such as end-to-end precision time synchronization at ms accuracy. We have also updated the information on example research enabled by ARA.
• Besides research and innovation, ARA can be used to support experiential learning that would be infeasible otherwise. See ARA in Education.
• I am excited to share that we will host major events in the last week of June 2025, with the objective of of bringing together the wireless and AgTech communities across industry, academia, government, and communities. Example events will include the Public Expo of the major NTIA Innovation Fund project ACCoRD, AraFest’25, and other potential events led by partners such as the Next G Alliance. Mark your calendar, stay tuned via the ara-users Google group, and follow ARA in LinkedIn and YouTube.

 

As always, we would love to learn and feature your work using ARA; please consider sharing your stories here.

 

With best holiday wishes,

 

Hongwei

--

https://arawireless.org