Arena is an open-access wireless testing platform based on a grid of antennas mounted on the ceiling of a large office-space environment.
Each antenna is connected to programmable software-defined radios enabling sub-6 GHz 5G-and-beyond spectrum research.
With 12 computational servers, 24 software-defined radios synchronized at the symbol level, and a total of 64 antennas,
Arena provides the computational power and the scale to foster new technology development in some of the most crowded spectrum bands.
Arena is based on a three-tier design, where the servers and the software-defined radios are housed in a double rack in a dedicated room, while the antennas are hung off the ceiling of a 2240 square feet office space
and cabled to the radios through 100 ft-long cables.
This ensures a reconfigurable, scalable, and repeatable real-time experimental evaluation in a real wireless indoor environment.
In the related publications, we introduce the architecture, capabilities, and system design choices of Arena,
and provides details of the software and hardware implementation of various testbed components.
Furthermore, we describe key capabilities by providing examples of published work that employed Arena for applications as diverse as synchronized MIMO transmission schemes,
multi-hop ad hoc networking, multi-cell 5G networks, AI-powered Radio-Frequency fingerprinting, secure wireless communications, and spectrum sensing for cognitive radio.
We hope that its open-access system, its three-tiered architecture, its full symbol level synchronization, and its unique line of sight indoor ceiling-grid layout ensuring reconfigurable, scalable, and repeatable real-time real wireless channel experiments will foster the development of new 5G-and-beyond technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence powered wireless networks, cognitive radio, dynamic spectrum access, and massive MIMO applications.
