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GENI WiMAX site build-outs are creating an open, programmable, GENI-enabled “4G-like” infrastructure at 11 major research university campuses.  Experimenters have started to use this infrastructure for both local and remote experiments, and tutorials are being provided to train future experimenters.  More information is available on the GENI wiki for WiMAX meso-scale deployments.  The design and deployment of GENI WiMAX technology is being led by Rutgers WINLAB.

GENI WiMAX Infrastructure

GENI-enabled WiMAX base stations installed on 8 (soon to be 11) campuses provide network researchers with “4G-like” services and wide-area coverage.  They operate on the 2.5GHz Educational Broadband Services band using experimental licenses issued by the FCC, and cooperate with Clearwire to avoid interference with their commercial services that utilize the same band.

See Figure 1 for the location of the existing and new campus sites.  Several sites are equipped with fixed “mobile stations” to support remote experimenters, and some sites provide WiFi service to allow “dual-homing” experiments.  One site (Rutgers WINLAB) uses an RF attenuator to connect a “mobile station” to a base station, and thus allow experiments with “over-the-air” wireless protocol parameters that could otherwise violate FCC rules.

Some sites feature installations with multiple base stations and antenna sectors, and are intended for mobility experiments that typically involve vehicular applications.

Figure 1. GENI WiMAX Campus Sites

Tutorials to Train WiMAX Experimenters

PI Thanasis Korakis and researcher Fraida Fund from the GENI WiMAX project at NYU Poly have taken the lead in developing WiMAX tutorials, designed to teach GENI researchers how to conduct productive WiMAX experiments.  Together with Ivan Seskar from Rutgers WINLAB and Manu Gosain from BBN Technologies, they have presented WiMAX tutorials at GEC13, TridentCom 2012 and GEC14.   Students at these tutorials conducted remote experiments on the open and programmable WiMAX testbeds at NYU Poly, Rutgers WINLAB and BBN Technologies.  Some experiments used a combination of available WiMAX and WiFi resources.  Some experiments spanned multiple sites, which were connected by a mesh of L2 VLAN connections setup through the GENI core network.

At the GEC14 tutorial, students were gathered into small groups, each led by one instructor, to setup and conduct a challenging and illustrative experiment.  For example, one group evaluated the implementation of a cooperative recovery protocol in a heterogeneous network situation, where a live feed is streamed at a high rate over the primary (WiMAX) network, and clients form a secondary (WiFi) network to recover lost packets from each other;  a high-level view of the configuration is shown in Figure 2.  See poster and slides for more details on this experiment.

If you want to learn more about using GENI WiMAX resources in your experiment, see the posted descriptions of WiMAX experiments, demos and tutorials, check the guide for WiMAX experimenter support, send a note to the WiMAX experimenters mailing list and/or sign up for a WiMAX tutorial when it is announced on the tutorial list.

Figure 2. WiMAX Broadcast Network with WiFi Networking Among Clients