UCLA Engineering Leads New Hybrid Wireless Networked Testbed Project By Marlys Amundson UCLA and five partner institutions around the country were selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a wireless network testbed. The grant, worth more than $5.5 million, will finance 12 interconnected multidisciplinary testbeds, six in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Researchers will design and develop WHYNET, a wireless hybrid networked testbed that will redefine how specific innovations in wireless communication technologies are evaluated. WHYNET will provide a federated testbed for researchers to evaluate the impact of experimental technologies on application level performance, using scalable and realistic scenarios. Researchers will be creating and evaluating new technologies from the radio layer to protocol stacks. “The next generation of mobile technology is impacted by innovations at many levels - the impact of these innovations cannot adequately be evaluated in isolation, or their behavior easily predicted,” noted Rajive Bagrodia, principle investigator and a computer science professor at UCLA. “The key to exploiting these technologies lies in determining the cross-layer interactions.” WHYNET is funded by the NSF’s Networking Research Testbeds (NRT) program, which is designed to create a new generation of networking technologies. Through this program, researchers will test and refine new concepts and architectures using a number of independent testbeds that have been designed and built by the researchers. “The WHYNET project is exceptional because of the breadth of the heterogeneous wireless networks and evaluation systems being built, as well as the distinguished team of investigators,” commented Dr. Joseph B. Evans, program director of the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the NSF. “Researchers are addressing a wide range of wireless networking technologies using simulation, emulation, and field experiments. The integration of methods and technologies promises broad impact, which will be amplified through the team’s industrial collaborations.” Envisioned as a hybrid testbed that combines the realism of physical testing with the scalability and flexibility of simulations, WHYNET will use devices and systems developed by researchers at UCLA and the other participating universities, as well as off-the-shelf components. By creating a federation of highly specialized testbeds on separate campuses, WHYNET researchers can avoid duplicating work already under way at another institution, and leverage existing resources to conduct more intricate projects. “There is a rich history of wireless networking research at UCLA,” said Vijay K. Dhir, dean of the School. “The WHYNET project will enable our faculty and students to rapidly advance research in the field in new and interesting ways.” When complete, researchers throughout the wireless community will be able to remotely upload models to the WHYNET testbed, enabling them to investigate how new systems and devices would behave in a real-world setting. “The problems facing researchers in industry and academia are related and the testbed will give them the means to efficiently test new ideas and solutions,” explained Bagrodia. The WHYNET testbeds, located at universities around California and in Delaware, will be connected via the Internet, allowing researchers to test new components on the entire system, not just on those testbeds located on site. Each of the universities will be examining specific aspects of wireless networking, including security and quality of service. There will be six testbeds located at UCLA, each focusing on a different area of wireless networking: mobile, ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, narrowband radio SDR, fast frequency hopped spread spectrum radios, multi-input-multi-output systems and smart antennas. UCLA researchers will leverage the wide range of expertise in wireless networking available in the computer science and electrical engineering departments. “Few universities can claim the breadth of talent across technologies that we can,” said Bagrodia. Electrical engineering professor Michael Fitz is testing and refining two radio testbeds through WHYNET. The narrowband testbed is similar in nature to a mobile phone system in that it covers a fairly wide physical area, although with smaller bandwidth than a typical mobile system. Researchers in his lab are testing its capabilities for land-based, mobile radio/data communications by driving through the coverage area and examining the performance of system elements from a moving automobile. This testbed is fairly mature, with the radio equipment and associated demodulated algorithms ready for use by networking specialists through WHYNET. His other system, a wideband radio testbed, is less mature. Researchers on this project are testing and validating the algorithms that will enable wireless local area communication. They are testing new 802.11n technologies for the testbed, which will develop tools for wireless data communication between laptops on a high-speed network. “The physical layer algorithms for wireless communications between nodes is fairly mature, we know how to do it and do it well,” noted Fitz. “But the interaction between the networking layer and the physical layer opens up new research issues that WHYNET researchers will be able to explore through new collaborations.” The research will also generate a repository of wireless networking scenarios, measurements, models and implementations. Although there is considerable information available on the behavior of wired networks, there is very little available on wireless networks. The data derived from research on the testbeds will enable validation of simulation models, determine base performance of high layer protocols and radio devices, and generate a rich set of wireless protocol models. The Ultra-Wideband Radio Laboratory (UltRa Lab) at the University of Southern California (USC) was formed in 1996 to promote the study of ultra-wideband radio technology, one of the first facilities of its kind at a university. The UltRa Lab facilities provide an infrastructure for design, measurement and testing of new systems elements. UltRa Lab founder, Robert Scholtz, USC’s Fred H. Cole Professor of Engineering, was among the first to study ultra-wideband from an experimental and theoretical perspective in either academia or industry. Although researchers have been working on radio for more than 70 years, they have been studying ultra-wideband as a radio technology for less than a decade. “The technology is significantly less mature than other areas, and we’re using prototype versions of most of the transmission and receiver equipment,” said Urbashi Mitra, an electrical engineering professor at USC. “The standards are in process and we’re still collecting sufficient data to develop accurate channel models.” Because of its relative youth, the UltRa Lab’s emphasis is on testing and measurement, rather than establishing a communications system. Under the WHYNET project, Mitra and her research group will be developing the tools to move the research lab closer to a fully realized experimental communications facility for ultra-wideband radio. They will be characterizing existing ultra-wideband radios and taking measurements, as well as building a simulation bedrock and channel models for the system. At UC San Diego, researchers have deployed an innovative application over a new community wireless system, developed by Qualcomm and currently available in San Diego and Washington DC that allows subscribers unlimited access to the Internet over a cellular system. The connection speeds are comparable to those over a cable modem. Researchers at UCSD are using three base stations provided by Qualcomm and Ericsson as part of the network. “The system gives users access anywhere a cell phone works - on a train or in a cab, in a restaurant,” explained electrical and computer engineering Professor Ramesh Rao, who is also director of UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommun- ications and Information Technology. “Unlike WiFi connections, users don’t need to worry about losing their connection as they move from location to location. We’ll see new applications emerging that exploit this technology once it becomes available in more locations.” Rao’s team of researchers is using their cellular testbed to create solutions for end users. For example, doctors can receive data on stroke patients via a cellular video transmittal system, allowing them to make accurate diagnoses and recommend treatment more effectively from a distance. “Our work goes beyond the technical specifications,” said Rao. “We’re interested in taking real life concerns and addressing them from an engineering perspective.” UCLA’s WHYNET partners are UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, UCSD, USC, and the University of Delaware. The program has already received interest and support from key partners in industry, including Intel, Nokia, Microsoft, HRL Laboratories, Extreme Spectrum, and ST Microelectronics, as well as input from researchers at Livermore National Laboratory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For more information on the WHYNET project, please visit http://may.cs.ucla.edu/projects/whynet/.