Open-Access Research Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

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Orbit News

New Maintenance Time

Please note we have moved weekly maintenance from Thursday to Wednesday afternoons, from 3:00PM to 5:00PM EST.

New Power Supplies

We started replacing internal power supplies with external ones and the progress can be monitored here. New power supplies are 200 W FSP200-50PLA2 This round of replacement doesn't have aesthetic qualities of the original (as can be seen in the attached picture) but definitely solves the reliability problem. And the pile of old internal power supplies is growing (if anybody has an idea of what to do with them please let us know). It is expected that the upgrade will be completed, at least for the failed units, in the next two-three weeks. (...)

New grid reservation policies

Effective immediately, we'll be using the following policies to try to ensure that access to the grid and sandboxes is allocated fairly and efficiently. Also, these policies should make planning out your time on ORBIT more reliable. (...)

First ORBIT user group meeting

The first ORBIT Users Group meeting was held on June 6th 2006. Some main points discussed were:

1) Wireless driver

  • Features
  • Usage
  • Libmac

2) Measurements (OML)

  • What is needed?
  • How do people use it for?

3) Portal (...)

ORBIT is a two-tier laboratory emulator/field trial network testbed designed to achieve reproducibility of experimentation, while also supporting evaluation of protocols and applications in real-world settings.

The laboratory-based wireless network emulator uses a novel approach involving a large two-dimensional grid of 400 802.11 radio nodes which can be dynamically interconnected into specified topologies with reproducible wireless channel models.

Once the basic protocol or application concepts have been validated on the lab emulator platform, users can migrate their experiments to the field trial network which provides a configurable mix of both high-speed cellular (3G) and 802.11 wireless access in a real-world setting.

Orbit is seeded by a $5.45M/4yr grant from the NSF under the Networking Research Testbeds (NRT) program. The project is a collaborative effort between several university research groups in the NY/NJ region: Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton, along with industrial partners Lucent Bell Labs, IBM Research and Thomson. ORBIT is being developed and operated by WINLAB, Rutgers University. A parallel set of experimental work packages (EWP) was also funded by NSF in order to drive user requirements during the design of the testbed and also provide benchmarks for the usability and effectiveness of the testbed in performing different types of wireless experiments with ease.

The testbed is available for remote or on-site access by other research groups nationally. Additional research partners and testbed equipment/software contributors are actively sought from both industry and academia.

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