Change in reservation policy for the indoor OTA lab

[Kirk Webb]

Hello POWDER community,

We have changed the policy for how resources are reserved in the
POWDER indoor OTA lab. Only a single reservation covering a particular
time window may be present at a time for indoor lab resources,
regardless of how many devices are included in the reservation. This
isn't good news for overall lab availability, but do note that you can
submit and have more than one reservation in the system for different
time windows.

The reason for the change is to prevent conflicts between simultaneous
experiments from different users. The key difficulty is that when two
(or more) experimenters run different 5G gNB (or 4G eNB) services, the
COTS UEs can get confused and behave unexpectedly, attaching to the
wrong gNB/Core, taking a long time to attach, or not attempting to
attach at all. There is also simply more potential to inadvertently
impact a fellow experimenter by using the wrong channel on accident
when running experiments at the same time in the indoor OTA lab.

Please let us know if you have questions or concerns regarding this change.

Best,
Kirk Webb on behalf of the POWDER team