The focus of this project is to plan for and then assemble an initial outdoor vehicular testbed, called MadBed (for its location in Madison, Wisconsin) equipped with unique capabilities of spectrum agility.
The testbed has been designed: (i) to enable a research plan that involves experimental support for ongoing projects of multiple research groups, initially at UW-Madison, and after the planning phase, for open access.
(ii) to initiate an educational plan that focuses on a laboratory-oriented curriculum and facilitates distance learning programs with other educational institutions; and introduces an undergraduate wireless experimentation laboratory that supplements courses with hands-on experience; and
(iii) to realize an outreach plan that includes public release of developed platforms and software, open availability of the testbed to the broader wireless research community, and demonstration of wireless substrate that may be of great value for research in the GENI vision.
The testbed is being deployed in the downtown area of Madison, WI. The pilot deployment for planning consists of 5 roadside (static) nodes and 4 vehicular mobile nodes, each equipped with a combination of software defined radio (SDR) and off-the-shelf radio interfaces. SDR technologies are ideally suited for use in vehicular networking environments where the conditions for communication can change rapidly with mobility and there needs to be adaptation at high speeds or else the vehicular networking will not become reliable enough to meet societal requirements.
MadBed is expected to evolve into a first-of-its-kind: a metro-scale, public testbed for research in vehicular networking with the use of spectrum agile interfaces. The broader impacts will derive from providing new capabilities and new degrees of reliability and resilience to an emerging type of communication, vehicular networking, that is expected to change the American scene.
