Date: Thursday, September 17, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM (registration and light lunch from 11:30 AM; reception to 6:00 PM; optional off-site dinner from 6:30 PM)
Location: WINLAB, Rutgers University, 671 Route 1 South, North Brunswick, NJ 08902
Attendance: In person. Free, but registration is required.
Register: eventbrite.com/e/1998936074609
Next-Generation Testbed Capabilities
FR3, the digital twin, and street-level sensing — what COSMOS3 does today, and what we still need to build.
Upper mid-band radio, a channel-calibrated digital twin, and street-level sensing decide what the next generation of COSMOS experiments can be. This is a requirements workshop, not a showcase: the output is what each of those three has to become next. Half a day, one room, and an open session in which the community says what it cannot run yet.
Draft program
| Time | Session | Presenter / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 11:30 – 12:00 | Registration and light lunch | |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | Welcome and the COSMOS3 roadmap — the four-year plan, and where the three threads meet | Ivan Seskar, Rutgers/WINLAB |
| 12:15 – 12:45 | FR3 and the next-generation node — the SB1 sandbox today, and what comes next | |
| 12:45 – 1:10 | Scalable Wireless Digital Twins and Machine Learning for High-fidelity RF Signal Mapping | Tingjun Chen, Duke University |
| 1:10 – 1:50 | Keynote — FR3: why now. What has changed in spectrum, silicon and standards to make this the moment to build in the band | Sundeep Rangan — Director, NYU WIRELESS; Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering; IEEE Fellow |
| 1:50 – 2:00 | Break | |
| 2:00 – 2:25 | Dynamic Spectrum Access research in the COSMOS PAWR | Carlos Caicedo, Syracuse University |
| 2:25 – 2:50 | Securing Smart Cities with COSMOS: From Real-Time Video Analytics to Trusted Navigation | Jhonatan Tavori, Columbia University |
| 2:50 – 3:05 | Networking in a Quantum COSMOS | John Louis Drogo, Columbia University |
| 3:05 – 4:00 | Demo break | |
| 4:00 – 5:00 | What do you need next in COSMOS? One open session, everyone in the room — the experiment you cannot run yet, and what stops you | |
| 5:00 – 6:00 | Reception — joint with W4AI attendees arriving for Friday | |
| 6:30 onwards | Dinner (off-site) — optional, separate free ticket |
Where COSMOS is today
Upper mid-band
A bookable FR3 sandbox: Pi-Radio heterodyne front ends in SB1, 2×2 TX/RX, an IF interface to USRP-2974 SDRs, wideband Vivaldi antennas, and up to 160 MHz of signaling with precise gain and LO control. First measurements at 10–10.5 and 12.2–12.7 GHz, bookable now via sb1.cosmos-lab.org, with four published tutorials. Next: native 10 MHz–20 GHz at 1 GHz instantaneous bandwidth.
The digital twin
A 3.5 GHz sounding campaign — 20 positions, 16 for training and 4 held out — feeds measured channel impulse responses into NVIDIA AODT and Sionna RT, so the twin is calibrated against the street rather than assumed. Duke’s Geo2SigMap builds scenes from open map data and trains a cascaded U-Net purely on synthetic ray-traced data, predicting RSRP to 6.04 dB RMSE — 3.59 dB better than statistical, ray-tracing and prior ML methods.
Street-level sensing
The next-generation medium node carries six modalities on one time-aligned data plane — lidar, thermal, 4 MP RGB, a 16-channel acoustic array, air quality and climate, and UWB anchors. ISAC runs on 28 GHz phased arrays, with every dataset published out to the Smart Streetscapes community.
Call for participation
Bring the experiment you cannot run yet. On the table:
- Antennas and arrays across 7–24 GHz — what designs, and from whom?
- 1 GHz end-to-end — full-bandwidth sounding implies at least 25 GbE (realistically 100 GbE) fronthaul, with storage and compute to match.
- Twin fidelity — what error, against what measurement, makes a simulated result publishable?
- Sensing and ground truth — which modalities, at what rate, labeled how?
- Coexistence and incumbents — what must a testbed demonstrate to earn outdoor FR3 authorization?
There is a demo break from 3:05 to 4:00 PM. If you would like to show something, tell us what you need and we will find you a table, power and spectrum.
Coming from out of town? Stay for Friday.
The STAIRWAI to COSMOS Workshop on Wireless for AI (W4AI) runs the next day, Friday, September 18, 2026, at the same venue — a full day on making AI applications wireless-native. Register: eventbrite.com/e/1998936130777
Draft agenda (PDF)
COSMOS3 Community Workshop — draft agenda (PDF)
Organized by the COSMOS3 team (Rutgers · Columbia · Duke). Supported by NSF award 2450567, CIRC: ENS/Grand: COSMOS3 — Enhancing and Sustaining the COSMOS Platform.