New York City and Salt Lake City will both become large-scale testbeds for smart city and 5G technologies, having won funding from the National Science Foundation and a consortium of wireless industry companies under the Platform for Advanced Wireless Research program.
PAWR provides $50 million in federal funding, plus $50 million in cash and in-kind contributions from industry partners, for the development of four city-scale testbeds for wireless technology research. New York and Salt Lake are the first two announced testbeds, with two more to come later this year. According to NSF award data, the Salt Lake City project will receive an estimated $17.5 million and the New York City project will receive about $12.5 million.
“These networks are the foundation for a new breed of services rapidly becoming possible in neighborhoods and municipalities across the country,” wrote Joe Kochan, project director for US Ignite, which manages the PAWR fund in partnership with Northeastern University. “One day soon, we’ll look back on the launch of these platforms as the beginning of a paradigm shift, a profound transformation of the fundamental ways in which we as Americans work, live, learn, and play in society.”
In Salt Lake City, the Platform for Open Wireless Data-driven Research — or POWDER — will cover 2.3 square miles of the University of Utah campus, 1.2 square miles of downtown Salt Lake and a two-mile corridor connecting the two locations. US Ignite said that those locations potentially will reach up to 40,000 people.POWDER currently has a small-scale, indoor “preview” version of its platform available for early-access users and plans to hold an initial community workshop next month.
POWDER will utilize hardware and technology from the Reconfigurable Ecosystem for Next-gen End-to-End Wireless, aka RENEW, which is a technology partnership involving Rice University, the University of Michigan and Texas Southern University.
“While it will enable wireless research across many technical areas, the research platform will offer unique and specialized capabilities for dynamic spectrum sharing and advanced wireless antenna technologies,” US Ignite said in describing the SLC project. According to the RENEW web site, its work will take an open-source approach and include programmable wide-band radios, including 5G bands at 3.5 GHz; large-scale and massive multiple-input-multiple-output, and “novel PHY and network stacks, including 5G-like and WiFi protocol stacks.”
In New York City’s West Harlem neighborhood, there will be a one-square-mile testbed focused on “ultra-high-bandwidth and low-latency wireless communications, with tightly coupled edge computing,” including millimeter-wave exploration and dynamic optical switching technologies. That project is the Cloud Enhanced Open Software-Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment (COSMOS), a technology partnership between Rutgers University, Columbia University and New York University, collaborating with New York City, Silicon Harlem, City College of New York, University of Arizona and IBM. COSMOS said that the boundaries of the testbed will be City College to the north, Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus to the south, the Hudson River to the west, and the Apollo Theater to the east.
“This vibrant, densely populated neighborhood is seen as an ideal place to push the bandwidth and latency limits of 4G, and even fifth-generation wireless technology, or 5G,” according to COSMOS, which plans to utilize 28 GHz spectrum, involve area students in the project work and include community technology outreach to introduce the work to local residents.
US Ignite has also issued a request for information to ask for input on its second round of funding awards, which are slated for late summer. RFI responses are due by May 31.
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