ORBIT - Wireless Network Testbed

Technology Rationale:
It is recognized that powerful technology and market trends towards portable computing and communication imply an increasingly important role for wireless access in the next-generation Internet. At the same time, new sensor and pervasive computing applications are expected to drive large-scale deployments of embedded computing devices interconnected large-scale deployments of embedded computing devices interconnected via new types of short-range wireless networks. The speed of technology innovation in the wireless networking field can be significantly increased with the development of a flexible, open-access wireless network testbed that can be shared by experimental researchers across the networking community.

Technical Approach:
The proposed ORBIT (Open Access Research Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Networks) system is a two-tier laboratory emulator/field trial network testbed designed to achieve reproducibility of experimentation, while also supporting evaluation of protocols and applications in real-world settings.  In particular, the laboratory-based wireless network emulator will be constructed using a novel approach involving a large two-dimensional grid of static and mobile 802.11x radio nodes which can be dynamically interconnected into specified topologies with reproducible wireless channel models.  All radio devices in the system provide open API’s that permit end-users to download radio link, MAC and network layer protocols to construct a specific networking scenario.  Once the basic protocol or application concepts have been validated on the lab emulator platform, users can migrate their experiments to the field trial network which provides a configurable mix of both high-speed cellular (3G) and 802.11x wireless access in a real-world setting.  Extensive measurement tools will be provided to support research evaluation, including both network traffic and radio link/spectrum usage aspects.
 

The ORBIT research team will also carry out a comprehensive set of “experimental work packages” intended to generate system requirements and serve as end-user application drivers for the testbed being developed.  The topics covered include ad-hoc 802.11 networks, security, location-aware services, VoIP, intelligent middleware, multimedia services and pervasive computing.

Results to Date and Future Work Plan:
A $5.45M/4yr grant for the ORBIT project has been awarded by the NSF under the Networking Research Testbeds (NRT) program,  with a start date of Sept 2003 .  The project is a collaborative effort between several university research groups in the NY/NJ region: Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton, along with industrial partners Lucent Bell Labs, IBM Research and Thomson.  The wireless network testbed will be developed and operated by Rutgers WINLAB, using facilities located at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus and at partner sites in the area.  The testbed will be available for remote or on-site access by other research groups nationally. Additional research partners and testbed equipment/software contributors will be actively sought from both industry and academia during the course of the project.

For more detail, please see the following presentation:

• ORBIT Overview