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A paper on the programmable and open-access millimeter-wave radios in the COSMOS testbed will appear in ACM WiNTECH’21

In a paper that will appear in the 15thACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & CHaracterization (WiNTECH’21), Prof. Tingjun Chen (Duke University) along with COSMOS team members from IBM Research, Rutgers, Columbia, and NYU report on the design and implementation of programmable and open-access millimeter-wave (mmWave) radios at 28/60 GHz that have been integrated in the COSMOS testbed.

In particular, the paper presents the programmable mmWave front ends and their integration with USRP software-defined radios (SDRs) and/or the Xilinx RFSoC boards. These front ends include (i) the IBM 28 GHz 64-element dual-polarized phased array antenna module (PAAM) subsystem board, and (ii) the Sivers IMA 60 GHz WiGig transceiver system. It also presents the developed software and application program interfaces (APIs) for hardware control and experimentation. Finally, it presents measurements and experiments with the 28 GHz PAAM board, which is integrated with a USRP N310, and the 60 GHz Sivers IMA transceiver, which is integrated with a USRP N310 and a Xilinx RFSoC board. These open-access hardware/software resources and example experiments can be extended to more complicated networking scenarios and facilitate experimentation with advanced mmWave technologies.

The COSMOS Sandbox 1 (sb1): (a) view of a corner of sb1 in an indoor environment, and (b) block diagram of the bench-top mmWave setup with programmable 28/60 GHz front end systems, customized RF switches, USRP SDRs, and Xilinx RFSoC boards.
The COSMOS Sandbox 1 (sb1): (a) view of a corner of sb1 in an indoor environment, and (b) block diagram of the bench-top mmWave setup with programmable 28/60 GHz front end systems, customized RF switches, USRP SDRs, and Xilinx RFSoC boards.

More details can be found in the following paper:

  • T. Chen, P. Maddala, P. Skrimponis, J. Kolodziejski, X. Gu, A. Paidimarri, S. Rangan, G. Zussman, and I. Seskar, “Programmable and open-access millimeter-wave radios in the PAWR COSMOS testbed,” in Proc. ACM MobiCom’21 Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & CHaracterization (WiNTECH’21) (to appear), 2021. [download]