Technology
Argos was first developed at Rice in 2011 as a 64-antenna base station, becoming the first Massive MIMO base station ever built. Since then, Argos has evolved with two newer versions. The most recent version of Argos (ArgosV3) has been already deployed around Rice campus as part of the ArgosNet project. Argosv3, now known as Faros, is developed by Skylark Wireless and now commercially available.
Our Goals
The RENEW platform aim is to serve three goals: 1) Integrate and deploy on the POWDER platform, at the University of Utah campus and areas around the campus. 2) Empower custom testbeds, using Iris and Faros, to enable novel applications. 3) Work closely with other open-source efforts, like OpenAirInterface, to empower next-generation of wireless equipment.
News
The RENEW team will be part of the 1st international workshop on open software defined wireless networks (colocated with MobiSys 2020)>>See more
Our team is launching the RENEW Visitors Program inviting the community to come to Rice to work with us on the massive MIMO platform>>See more
Ashu Sabharwal will give a talk at the IEEE 5G World Forum's Workshop on 5G Applications and Services in Dresden Germany>>See more
RENEW Features
The RENEW project will develop world’s first fully programmable and observable wireless radio network. With RENEW, wireless research and development community will be able to test diverse ideas and concepts, ranging from low-level hardware to all the way to novel applications. The project will support many firsts, like
- Programmable wide-band radios, including 5G bands of 2.5 and 3.5 GHz
- Large-scale MIMO, including massive MIMO
- Novel PHY and network stacks, including 5G-like and WiFi-like protocol stacks
- Observable at all layers of the protocol stack
- Use of distributed computational resources throughout the infrastructure
RENEW is a partnership of Rice University, University of Michigan and Texas Southern University. The RENEW team will leverage extensive past experience, namely
- Rice WARP (founded in 2006, PI Sabharwal), a high-performance open-source SDR platform that has been used by 450+ research papers as of November 2017.
- Rice TFA wireless (founded 2006, PI Knightly) that is one of the largest free wireless network, in an under-resourced community, operational for more than a decade.
- Rice Argos (founded in 2010, PI Zhong), developed the world’s first massive MIMO programmable platform.
- UMich Mobilab (founded in 2011, PI Mao), has developed some of the most widely used mobile measurement toolkits.
- TSU VR-Lab (PI Chen), has developed world’s open-source teaching labs for conducting experiments with physical objects, like robotic agents.
