ARA is an at-scale Platform for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR), specifically tailored to the unique community, application, and economic context of rural regions. It features the first-of-its-kind real-world implementation of long-distance, high-capacity wireless backhaul and access systems spanning over 30 km in diameter. Leveraging both software-defined radios and programmable Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) systems, ARA orchestrates the wireless resources alongside the networking and compute resources for enabling end-to-end experiments involving user equipment, base stations, edge computing, and cloud infrastructure. Such an integration facilitates the coevolution of rural-focused wireless innovation and applications, while helping to advance the frontiers of advanced Next-G wireless systems such as Open RAN. As of summer 2024, ARA is publicly accessible with 7 base stations (BSes) and over 30 user equipment (UEs). In this demo, we share advanced wireless research experiments enabled by ARA, involving MU-MIMO in TV White Space (TVWS) bands, long-range mmWave and microwave backhaul communications, and open-source 5G NR protocol stacks such as srsRAN and OpenAirInterface (OAI).

As the Platform for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) in rural broadband, the ARA wireless living lab features the deployment of first-of-its-kind wireless access and backhaul platforms in real-world agriculture and rural settings, and preliminary experiments have demonstrated very promising results, e.g., up to 3.2 Gbps wireless access throughput and more than 10 Gbps throughput across a wireless backhaul link of over 10 km. ARA is expected to be publicly released for broad community use starting in September 2023. Through this demo, we plan to share, for the first time, with the wireless research community the transformative research experiments enabled by ARA. To stimulate discussion and community participation, we will demonstrate a few example experiments ranging from MU-MIMO in TV White Space (TVWS) bands to long-range mmWave and microwave backhaul communications, as well as open-source 5G NR protocol stacks such as srsRAN and OpenAirInterface.