In July, engineers at Rutgers University, an institution that claims it houses the world’s largest wireless academic testbed, will modify 50 programmable radio nodes and deploy them in West Harlem, turning the Manhattan neighborhood of 30,000 residents into an outdoor laboratory, reported NJTV.
Rutgers, Columbia University, and NYU are teaming up in this seven-year project to create, find and test these new technologies, funded by the National Science Foundation and an industry consortium.
So why get started in West Harlem? It represents an increasingly urbanized area with tall buildings, a dense population, and an ever-growing demand for more bandwidth and data.
According to Ivan Seskar, COSMOS project director at Rutgers’ Wireless Information Network Laboratory, “The need for data to more quickly reach its destination – known as lower latency – requires increasing the capacity of the system…forcing us to look at the new technologies which don’t exist yet.”
Researchers say by improving latency, machines can communicate faster with other machines to produce faster times for self-driving cars to act, reported NJTV.
Additionally, another experiment is using new millimeter wave bands to grow capacity. That would require more cell towers, instead, researchers will try out higher frequency antennas for a process called advanced beamforming, according to NJTV. “[This] is the idea of focusing radio frequency toward a particular user and doing that on a massive scale,” Seskar said.
COSMOS’ open-access platform will invite experiments and competition from across the country and lead to new technologies and devices, according to COSMOS Principal Investigator, Dipankar Raychaudhuri. Regarding the experiment in West Harlem, the first in the world to test the new technology, Seskar said, “It’s really critical because the only real proof that technology is viable is if you show that people can use it.”
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Published May 31, 2018
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