ArMORED

Role. Energy efficiency research lead and field deployment lead, 2025 – present. Funding. $10M, NTIA Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund (NOFO-2). Partners. Skylark Wireless, Eridan Inc., Iowa State University. Full name. Architecture for mMIMO Open RAN Energy-efficient Devices.

What it is

Massive MIMO is one of the few wireless techniques that scales, but only if the radio units can hit aggressive power and cost targets. ArMORED is building a new generation of energy-efficient O-RU prototypes alongside Skylark Wireless and Eridan, then putting them through the kind of field measurements that determine whether a clever architecture survives contact with a real network. The energy story matters because mMIMO at scale is otherwise expensive enough (in watts, in heat, in TCO) to limit where it can be deployed.

What I do

I lead the energy efficiency study: measurement methodology, test case design, and the comparative analysis across architectures. On the deployment side, I’m taking the new O-RU prototype and integrating it with the O-CU/O-DU we already run on ARA, then driving the field campaigns that will tell us how the new devices behave outside the lab. There’s a tight loop here with ACCoRD: the integration tooling we built there is what makes these deployments possible at all.

Why it matters

If energy-efficient mMIMO O-RUs work, they unlock rural and underserved deployments where a power budget can be the difference between coverage and no coverage. That’s the line I’m trying to push.

Selected publications

2025

1. ComNet

   Design and Implementation of ARA Wireless Living Lab for Rural Broadband and Applications

   Taimoor Ul Islam, Joshua Ofori Boateng, Md Nadim, and 1 more author

   Computer Networks, 2025

   Bib

   @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}
   }

2023

1. WiNTECH

   AraMIMO: Programmable TVWS mMIMO Living Lab for Rural Wireless

   Taimoor Ul Islam, Tianyi Zhang, and others

   In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & Characterization (WiNTECH), 2023

   Awarded Bib

   Best Paper Award

   @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},
   }