The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research Project Office, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, has unveiled a testbed in central Iowa for researching rural wireless systems and applications.
The mult-modal platform is known as ARA, which stands for Agriculture and Rural Communities. It is based on the Iowa State University campus with coverage extending to local crop and livestock farms and parts of the city of Ames.
Spanning a rural area with diameter over 37 miles, ARA will serve as a wireless living lab for smart and connected rural communities, enabling the R&D of rural-focused wireless technologies that provide affordable, high-capacity connectivity to rural communities and industries such as agriculture.
An Ericsson 5G standalone network and multiple massive MIMO 5G base stations operating in mid-band and millimeter wave band spectrum will support precision agriculture applications and other research initiatives at ARA’s wireless living lab. Sample research will include the use of connected robots to collect plant phenotyping data, livestock monitoring, and agriculture automation.
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