The importance of mobile devices and the mobile networks that support them can hardly be overemphasized. Despite fantastic advances in wireless technologies and mobile devices, current mobile network architectures, while packet based, overwhelmingly resemble their circuit-switched forebears. To enable the fundamental research and innovation demanded to advance mobile networking beyond the state-of-the-art, a new facility called PhantomNet, will be developed and coupled with the Emulab testbed at the University of Utah. PhantomNet will be a fully programmable end-to-end mobile testbed with unique features to facilitate research efforts at the intersection of mobile networking, cloud computing and software defined networking.
PhantomNet will enable hands-on teaching in mobile networking technology in a manner that simply does not exist today. Further, the facility will enable forward-thinking research that re-considers the technical and economic factors involved with the interplay between mobile networks, software defined networks and cloud technologies. The availability of a physical facility will help researchers to transition new mobile network designs from theory into practice. Given that a large fraction of the world's population are already users of such networks, and that fraction is growing, the research enabled by this infrastructure will have the potential to have truly transformative impact.
