Frequently Asked Questions
General
Q: What is ANWET?
A: The Advanced National Wireless Ecosystem Testbed (ANWET) is an NSF funded planning effort that incorporates approximately 200 university and industry campuses. The first stage of ANWET will start with 5-10 campuses and is an inclusive project open to community colleges as well as universities. After a successful first stage, we would expand the deployment to the target size of 200 or more campuses.
Q: Which campus population would be interested in ANWET?
A: Students, faculty and other researchers interested in highly programmable experimental devices capable of transmitting over the entire wireless spectrum would be the target audience. While CS and EE focused researchers will be a natural fit, so will many other disciplines such as biomedical (wearable devices), environmental, and urban planners (sensor networks), etc. Wireless networking is a young field, and yet is so tightly bound into the structure of our society that it is predicted that the ratio of network-connected wireless devices to people will be in excess of 1:1 by 2020, and then continue to grow rapidly.
For Researchers
Overview
Q: What's special about the experimental devices?
A: These devices will enable researchers to conduct wide-ranging experiments that use the wireless spectrum in futuristic ways. The radios will be designed and distributed by ANWET at no cost to the end users.
Q: What's special about the experimental environment?
A: The ANWET devices will offer capabilities we expect to see in the consumer market some years in the future, which means anyone who has one can live in the wireless future now.
By deploying ANWET on 200 campuses, we will create an experimental environment where researchers are working in the future at a national scale.
The ANWET devices will work on any campus (provided the hosting campus consents to use by other ANWET researchers). An ANWET research project can develop a new wireless protocol or capability and, by visiting different campuses, test their invention in urban and rural environments, in deserts, on mountains, and in rain forests. Or, if a researcher doesn’t want to travel, they can share their software with researchers on other campuses and ask those researchers report on their experiences.
These kinds of collaborative environments have previously shown the ability to dramatically accelerate research in a field. Because everyone is working on the same platform, each innovation can be leveraged by everyone. Researcher Q does not have to “recreate” researcher R’s innovation - Q can simply use R’s code. Experiments can be trivially reproduced and tested in new environments and good ideas can swiftly be mutated into even better ideas.
Q: What legal, policy, or licensing constraints will I face as an ANWET researcher?
A: First, ANWET sites will be licensed to use the ANWET infrastructure to support experimental research. This means that when the ANWET radio is not within the geographic bounds of an ANWET site, it will be restricted from operating in an experimental mode.
Second, in order to obtain the necessary experimental licenses, we anticipate that each ANWET site will need to impose certain site-specific limitations on the operation of ANWET experimental radios. Examples might include restricting operation in certain frequency bands, or above certain power levels.
These limitations will be defined and enforced on a site-by-site basis using a collaborative site-wide mechanism, which will allow ANWET experimenters and experiments to dynamically learn about the limitations in force at any specific site, and then will monitor the behavior of ANWET radios to ensure that each site’s limitations are being respected.
Finally, to create the environment where each innovation can build on prior innovations, you will be required to license the results of any work you do on ANWET to all other ANWET researchers, but only for their use on ANWET. You can, if you wish, retain all commercial and other non-ANWET licensing rights.
Technical Characteristics
Q: How many ANWET devices can my site get?
A: The plan is to provide one ANWET device to every PhD student and full-time faculty member in Computer Science and/or Electrical Engineering on your campus. We would also provide two ANWET base stations. More devices will be available at cost.
Q: What is the form factor of the mobile programmable device?
A: Our current objective is that it be iPad-like.
Q: How is the ANWET mobile device powered?
It's powered through a USB 3.1 connector. If you wish to run it independently of a controlling host, you will need to plug the device into a USB 3.1 port on a battery or adapter.
Radio Modularity and Extensibility
Q: Is the ANWET radio modular?
A: The ANWET radio and its supporting software has multiple “modularity points”, intended to allow researchers with particular needs to extend and modify the base radio design with the minimum possible overhead.
Q: Can I add an optical front end for visible light?
A: We are fascinated that this is a frequently asked question.
You have two choices. You can connect via the standard antenna connectors (if that works). Or, you may attach a custom daughter card to the digital front end. If you handle the AD/DA transitions and analog logic, connect just about any front end you want.
Remote Experiment Execution
Q: I like the idea of 200 distinct campuses for experimentation but I can’t afford to travel to each one. Will there be support for remote experimentation?
A: Yes, in two ways.
First, we hope to provide support for a modest number of remote execution teams (RETs) who specialize in running experiments on your behalf.
The notion is that some of our campuses will be in particularly demanding wireless environments (e.g. a rain forest in Puerto Rico or the Pacific Northwest) and we will fund RETs on those campuses, so that everyone in ANWET can benefit from ANWET’s presence on those campuses. You will be able to point the RET on a campus to a GIT repository with your software and an experimental plan and they will run the experiment for you.
Second, the RET will notify you when your experiment will be run and you can track the experiment and its results in real time via the ANWET Measurement system.
Q: Will there be a charge for using the RET?
A: On campuses with ANWET-funded RETs, the service will be free, but there will be limits on how many times you can use it per year and the complexity of the experiment.
Other ANWET campuses are allowed (indeed encouraged) to create RETs and, if they wish, they can ask you to provide funds to cover the cost of your experiment.
For University CIOs and Cyberinfrastructure Professionals
Benefits and Participation
Q: How can you (CIO) become a pilot site for ANWET?
A: We are circulating these plans, while they are still in their early state, for your feedback. We are very excited at the idea of building a testbed that revolutionizes wireless experimentation and makes the testbed available on so many campuses in the United States. Please visit our website www.anwet.net or email info@anwet.net if you would like to be an earlier adopter or share your insights.
Q: What are the benefits to my campus researchers?
A: ANWET would dramatically lower barriers all along the path from cognition of a research idea to its incorporation into a product. ANWET would liberate ideas from the lab, enable new ground breaking research, and accelerate the overall pace of research in wireless data communications.
Q: What are the benefits for my student population?
A: We seek to broaden the research community, by eventually providing experimental radios to all PhD students. As a result, researchers and students in every EPSCOR state and at dozens of HBCU and Minority Institutions will participate. The development of a common research platform can also be leveraged for education. The platform will be ubiquitous, and easily adapted to classroom use.
Campus Safeguards
Q: How will the ANWET management insure that the testbed does not interfere with normal wireless operations on campus or in surrounding neighborhoods?
A: The ANWET National Testbed Operations Center will be responsible for Spectrum Coordination. The experimental devices will have controls that turn them to simple WiFi adapters off campus.
Q: How will the CIO’s office provide a map of current campus wireless activity to make sure there isn’t any interference?
A: Any other limitations on experimental use will be set on a per campus basis. Our plan is to have specialists (Testbed Tiger Team) visit each campus before it joins the testbed and meet with the campus CIO’s office, and the campus and local community’s health and safety officials, to prepare a campus spectrum plan. The plan would designate “off limits” spectrum, particularly health and safety bands. (The last thing we want is a student suffering harm because a 911 call did not go through due to a testbed experiment that used a safety band). After the testbed is turned on, we would do a follow-up visit to ensure that configurations are correct and that the relevant frequencies are disabled on that campus. We would have processes in place that allowed the CIO to have the spectrum map updated.
Q: How will the stop button in the CIO’s office operate?
A: ANWET is designed with very detailed safeguards to ensure that experimental uses do not interfere with existing services. As a backstop to these safeguards, ANWET provides the ability for a local site to rapidly terminate an experiment using the “stop button”. The stop button will be a national 800 number, handled at the national testbed operations center. The center will be able to selectively turn off devices and/or limit the portions of the spectrum a device can use on any participating campus.
Q: Is ANWET using licensed or unlicensed spectrum?
A: ANWET is designed to leverage the FCC experimental rules. These rules will limit wireless experiments to campuses and require us to support a “stop button” – a phone number that anyone can call if they believe our experiments are interfering with their existing legitimate use of the spectrum.
Privacy and Data Management
Q: Will ANWET collect wireless data from the testbed?
A: The center will also collect usage information from the devices, so that it can respond to any complaints with clear documentation. These reports will be shared with the CIO’s office on all stop button complaints that were relevant to your campus along with their resolution.
Facilities Issues
Q: What is the expected impact on campus facilities?
A: We anticipate that the facilities impact on the campus will be modest. Most of the experimental devices will be portable and carried around by students and faculty. However, there will also be a small number of experimental base stations and installing them will require access to a handful of computing closets and roof tops. We are still investigating whether extra (wired) Internet capacity will be required for a campus to support experimentation. If so, the testbed would provide the funds to upgrade the campus Internet connectivity.