A $16M NSF PAWR testbed for advanced wireless research and rural broadband
Role. Wireless network lead, 2021 – present. Funding. $16M, NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR). Partners. Iowa State University, USDA, partner farms and rural communities across central Iowa.
What it is
ARA is one of four NSF PAWR platforms in the United States and the only one focused on rural wireless. It’s a working living lab (a real wireless network spanning farms, labs, and rural towns around Ames, Iowa) that researchers use to run experiments on the same infrastructure that delivers broadband to actual residents and farms. The two roles aren’t separable: experiments only count if the network keeps working for the people who depend on it.
What I did
I designed and deployed the network end-to-end. That meant choosing equipment for multi-scale and multi-dimensional use cases, planning and installing routers, switches, servers, radios, antennas, and cabling, working directly with vendors and contractors through rollout, and standing up the OpenStack-based control plane that lets external researchers reserve resources and run their own experiments. Once the testbed was live, I led the Skylark Wireless mMIMO deployment and built it into a research platform for URLLC, massive MIMO, and rural broadband studies, including the publicly available AraMIMO repo of APIs that other groups can use to run PHY/MAC experiments without rebuilding the stack.
Why it matters
Most wireless research happens in lab conditions or in dense urban deployments. Rural environments break the usual assumptions: long distances, terrain, sparse infrastructure, real users on the line. ARA exists so that the next generation of wireless protocols and Open RAN designs gets tested where it actually has to work.
Recognition
The work behind ARA has won three Best Paper / Demo / Honorable Mention awards at IEEE NetSoft 2025, ACM WiNTECH 2023, MERIF 2024, and IEEE FNWF 2023. See the publications page for the full list.
@article{islam2025ara,title={Design and Implementation of {ARA} Wireless Living Lab for Rural Broadband and Applications},author={Islam, Taimoor Ul and Boateng, Joshua Ofori and Nadim, Md and others},journal={Computer Networks},volume={263},pages={111188},year={2025},publisher={Elsevier}}
@inproceedings{islam2024merif,title={{ARA} {PAWR}: Enabling Wireless Experiments with Programmable {COTS} {RAN} and {X-Haul} Platforms},author={Islam, Taimoor Ul and Nadim, Md and Zu, Guoying and others},booktitle={Midscale Experimental Research Infrastructure Forum (MERIF)},year={2024},}
@inproceedings{islam2024icnp,title={Demo: {ARA} {PAWR} Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities},author={Islam, Taimoor Ul and Boateng, Joshua and others},booktitle={Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)},year={2024}}
@inproceedings{zhang2024arao,title={{ARA-O-RAN}: End-to-End Programmable {O-RAN} Living Lab for Agriculture and Rural Communities},author={Zhang, Tianyi and Boateng, Joshua and Islam, Taimoor Ul and others},booktitle={Proceedings of Next-Generation Open and Programmable Radio Access Networks (NG-OPERA), IEEE INFOCOM},year={2024}}
@inproceedings{islam2023aramimo,title={{AraMIMO}: Programmable {TVWS} {mMIMO} Living Lab for Rural Wireless},author={Islam, Taimoor Ul and Zhang, Tianyi and others},booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation \& Characterization (WiNTECH)},year={2023},}
@inproceedings{islam2023arapawr,title={{ARA} {PAWR}: Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities},author={Islam, Taimoor Ul and Boateng, Joshua and others},booktitle={Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom)},pages={1--3},year={2023},publisher={ACM},doi={10.1145/3570361.3614068}}