Through its unique deployment in research and producer farms, grain mills, bio-processing plants, factories, and a constellation of rural communities and school districts, by including ag ground vehicles and robots as well as aerial vehicles, and by using state-of-the-art SDRs and COTS wireless access equipment, as well as long-distance, high-throughput wireless x-haul radios and LEO satellite communication platforms, ARA is a first-of-its-kind, real-world wireless living lab for smart and connected rural communities. By supporting fundamental communication services (e.g., ultra-reliable, low-latency wireless for safety-critical control and XR) that are shared across rural and urban applications (e.g., transportation), ARA enables field investigations of research questions that are of generic interest to rural and urban communities but are difficult to conduct in urban settings in early phases of the exploration. For instance, wireless-networked, safety-critical teleoperation of ground and aerial vehicles are better field-tested in open agriculture farms before their field tests and deployments in complex, crowded urban environments.
Example areas of wireless research and innovation enabled by ARA include:
- Open-Source NextG
- O-RAN
- TVWS Massive MIMO
- COTS 5G
- Long-Distance, High-Capacity X-Haul
- Dynamic Spectrum Sharing
ARA also enables research and innovation in Digital and Precision Agriculture as well as Connected Rural Communities that would be infeasible otherwise.
The figure below summarizes a subset of the ARA features and the enabled research. We expect many more research use cases to be invented by the communities thanks to the programmability and flexibility of ARA.
Register an account to use ARA, and join the ara-users Google group to collaborate with other users in advancing wireless research and applications. As you use ARA in research, education, and innovation, please let us know your exciting work via e2@arawireless.org; we are looking forward to highlighting your endeavors using ARA!