This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Accurate wireless measurements are critical to the sustained growth of deployed wireless networks, as well as the successful development of wireless innovations. Because of the significant effort required to deploy wireless networks and obtain reliable measurements, current wireless traces are lacking both in breadth of environments and consistency of methodology. The AirLab project seeks to facilitate meaningful analysis of wireless networks by deploying a distributed wireless measurement infrastructure that produces consistent and comparable wireless traces over different deployment environments. AirLab provides core periodic measurements as well as user-driven experiments, and a centralized repository for storing, accessing, and statistically analyzing wireless traces. The richness of these measurement datasets allows researchers to detect and confirm hidden trends, and derive statistically meaningful conclusions based on real-world observations. All AirLab measurements are public and accessible by the research community, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for research and enabling researchers to innovate without the upfront expenses of deploying local wireless testbeds. The project integrates its research outcomes into the undergraduate and graduate education programs. It also proactively seeks to increase the number of women and underrepresented groups in the field.
