EAGER: A Feasibility Study for a Wide-Area WiMAX Infrastructure for Wireless Experimentation

该项目正在评估利用WiMAX基站和客户端的户外无线实验设施的可行性。WiMax一直是4G蜂窝网络的候选标准之一，在技术上与更流行的4G标准(即LTE)非常相似。该实验设施如果成功，将允许研究人员(威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校本地和外部)在其上部署新型无线服务，并以现实的方式进行实验。然而，由于与设计、操作、可维护性和可用性相关的各种问题，建立这样一个实验设施是一个巨大的挑战。该项目的目标是评估可行性，并确定未来实施此类实验基础设施的一种可能方式。为了创建评估可行性的初步原型，威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校的研究人员在大学校园内外的各种户外地点部署了少量商业级无线基站。研究人员还部署了不同的客户端设备来测试基础设施的功能，以评估在系统中获取用户的各种策略。此外，该项目还在建立适当的网络连接，以便在未来能够在一些更关键的功能和基础设施上更具试验性的功能之间提供适当的隔离。该项目是通过麦迪逊地区的学术界和产业界合作实现的。

This project is evaluating the feasibility of an outdoor wireless experimentation facility that leverages WiMAX base stations and clients. WiMAX has been one of the candidate standards for 4G cellular networks, and is technologically fairly similar to the more popular 4G standards, namely LTE. The experimentation facility, if successful, will allow researchers (both local to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and external) to deploy new types of wireless services on them and experiment with them in a realistic manner. However, building such an experimental facility is a significant challenge due to various issues related to design, operations, maintainability, and usability. The goal of this project is to evaluate the feasibility and define one possible way to implement such an experimental infrastructure in the future.To create a preliminary prototype to evaluate feasibility, the researchers at UW-Madison are deploying a small number of commercial-grade wireless base stations at various outdoor locations in and around the university campus and beyond. The researchers are also deploying different client devices to test the functioning of the infrastructure to evaluate various strategies of acquiring users in the system. Furthermore, the project is also setting up appropriate network connectivity that can in the future provide suitable isolation between some of the more critical functions and the more experimental ones on the infrastructure. The project is being realized through an academia-industry partnership in the Madison area.