Rutgers-Columbia-NYU-NYC PAWR Brief UPDATE

COSMOS: Cloud-Enhanced Open Software Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment Project Team: Rutgers University, Columbia University and NYU, with New York City as municipal partner and Silicon Harlem as community partner Principal Investigators: Dipankar Raychaudhuri, Ivan Seskar – Rutgers University; Gil Zussman – Columbia University; Sundeep Rangan – NYU The $100M PAWR (Platforms for Advanced Wireless) program 1 recently announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to enable experimental research on advanced wireless technologies at radio device, wireless system, network protocol and application/service levels. The goal is to develop and deploy a flexible, open access advanced wireless testbed in a real-world environment with the scale, realism, diversity and user density necessary for in-depth and conclusive experimental studies currently beyond the reach of most academic and industry researchers. The PAWR project office expects to award two $20M city-scale wireless testbed projects in 2017-18, with another two grants to follow in 2018-19. Rutgers, Columbia, and NYU have formed a multi-university team to address the technical and deployment challenges of PAWR in collaboration with our municipal partner, the City of New York and our community partner, Silicon Harlem. The City of New York, under the leadership of the Chief Technology Officer, will work with the team to facilitate access to City assets, infrastructure, and fiber to enable the installation of node sites to support the PAWR platform. Our proposal aims to develop, deploy and operate the “COSMOS” (“Cloud-Enhanced Open Software-Defined Mobile-Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment”) advanced wireless platform in New York City. COSMOS targets the technology “sweet spot” of ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency, a capability that will enable a broad new class of applications including augmented/virtual reality and cloud-based autonomous vehicles. The COSMOS architecture also recognizes the importance of fast mobile core networks to keep pace with significant increases in wireless link bandwidth, and to effectively integrate emerging radio access networks with edge cloud computing. The proposed testbed deployment will cover ~1 sq-mi in NYC (Columbia U/West Harlem area/Central Harlem), incorporating 100’s of small, medium, and large radio nodes (most with fiber backhaul), with each node providing a mix of fully programmable software defined radios for flexible wireless experimentation and state-of-the-art commercial hardware capable of supporting networking and applications research with currently available end-user devices. The COSMOS testbed will enable several new classes of wireless experiments not currently supported by testbeds available to the research community. Experimental core technology research supported on the testbed will include high-speed radios, mm Wave, massive MIMO, adaptive beamforming, cell densification, next-generation mobile network architecture, optical x-haul networks and edge cloud integration, In addition, COSMOS will enable important new classes of applications which require high bandwidth and low latency such as 3D sensing and real time tactile control for a wide range of applications from remote medical procedures, immersive VR education, robotics, self-driving vehicles and control of emergency and safety devices. Many of these applications will benefit from the availability of computing at the edge to improve user latency experience while making it possible to scale rich media cloud services to billions of users on the move. The COSMOS/PAWR project outlined above is a collaborative community project which welcomes partnerships from industry and government. In particular, the Rutgers/Columbia/NYU team is seeking technology partners for development of the necessary platform hardware and software. In addition, we welcome collaboration from service providers who wish to participate in testbed deployment, service software development and operational aspects of the project. We also look forward to working with small companies, tech venture networks, municipal/civic organizations and non-profits to identify how the testbed can be used to develop technologies and applications/services of value to the local community. Contact Information: Email queries about partnership/collaboration, or requests for running research experiments on the COSMOS testbed to: gil@ee.columbia.edu.