Towards a City-scale Laboratory for Advanced Wireless Research

The last decade has seen an explosive growth in demands on wireless technologies. This project supports taking the first steps towards establishing a center of wireless innovation at UW–Madison centered around one of the first and most significant initiatives being proposed by the National Science Foundation in the coming few years — the creation of a preliminary prototype for a unique, city scale ”living laboratory” for wide-area experimentation of advanced wireless technologies, called WiNEST. It will be the first-of-its-kind outdoor testbed and infrastructure that allows researchers, local and remote, to run wide-area wireless experiments at moderate to large-scale (covering up to a 60 square miles area) — using emerging and future wireless (what is being called, 5G) technologies.

WiNEST will support the experiments that look at wireless communications challenges such as when more than 80,000 people descend in Camp Randall during a football Saturday, or in the event of a million or more users trying to communicate in the event of a natural disaster. The potential impact of this endeavor will be pioneering in the field, putting UW–Madison at the absolute forefront of research in this domain.

Principal Investigator

• Suman Banerjee
  Professor of Computer Sciences
  

Co-Principal Investigators

• Aditya Akella
  Associate Professor of Computer Sciences
• Xinyu Zhang
  Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering