Joshua Ofori Boateng

391C Durham Center

613 Morrill Road, Ames, IA 50011

Center for Wireless, Communities & Innovation (WiCI)

I am a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Wireless, Communities and Innovation (WiCI) affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. I build open, reliable, and scalable next-generation wireless systems — and the living-lab infrastructure needed to evaluate them under the challenging conditions of the real world.

My research focuses on Democratizing 5G/6G systems through open, reliable and scalable wireless infrastructure. Working at the intersection of wireless systems, networked infrastructure, and software engineering. I lead the design and deployment of the ARA Wireless Living Lab — a large-scale, fully programmable Open RAN testbed serving over 170 researchers across the U.S. In 2024 I spent 6 months at Microsoft Research building a GEO-based 5G non-terrestrial network testbed.

Today, I am building hardware-accelerated (e.g., GPU-based) AI-RAN on ARA with the Linux Foundation’s OCUDU and NVIDIA Aerial, and I co-designed the KaiAir interference-control and real-time scheduling algorithms leveraging OCUDU and Duranta UE. I represent Iowa State in the AI-RAN Alliance (WG2: AI-and-RAN) and in the OCUDU Technical Steering Committee’s AI-RAN and Hardware-Acceleration working groups.

My long-term vision is to make next-generation wireless innovation accessible, affordable, and deployable for rural, agricultural, and underserved communities, across Iowa, the broader Midwest and the United States as a whole.

Research Interests

Open, Programmable & Intelligent RAN

Open-source 5G/6G stacks (OCUDU, Duranta/OAI), software-defined and intelligent RAN control, spectrum slicing, multi-tenant SDR infrastructure.

AI-RAN & Hardware-Accelerated RAN

CUDA-accelerated physical layer (OCUDU, NVIDIA Aerial) and co-location of AI/ML and RAN workloads on shared accelerated infrastructure.

Wireless Testbeds & Living Labs

Large-scale experimental 5G/6G platforms, real-world open RAN prototyping, reproducible wireless experimentation.

URLLC & Deterministic Wireless

Measurement-driven latency modeling, system-level tuning for predictable low-latency 5G/6G, precision agriculture.

At a Glance

4×

Best Paper / Demo Awards

170+

Researchers using ARA

$20M+

Funded projects involved

100+

Citations

jboateng@iastate.edu · CV (PDF) · LinkedIn

news

Sep 29, 2026	Best Demo Award at MERIF 2026 (Washington, DC) for At-Scale, Real-World Physical AI for Precision Agriculture on the ARA Wireless Living Lab — a live OCUDU 5G + drone + edge-AI weed-detection demo with KaiAir. Our second MERIF Best Demo after 2024!
Sep 28, 2026	Attended the NSF PAWR PI Meeting at The George Washington University, Washington, DC.
Sep 11, 2026	New NSF award! Our multi-institution project AgSlicing: Predictable RAN and Spectrum Slicing for Precision Agriculture has been funded by the NSF VINES Track 2 program (Award #2554530), in collaboration with the University of Virginia, Skylark Wireless, Salin 247, and Federated Wireless.
Aug 31, 2026	Organized the NSF AgRuralG Workshop as part of AgWireless’26 (Ames, Iowa), collocated with the U.S. Farm Progress Show. I also served as Demo and Poster Chair — see the AgWireless’26 Posters & Demos and award winners.
Aug 06, 2026	Awarded a travel grant to attend MERIF 2026 (Midscale Experimental Research Infrastructure Forum) at The George Washington University, Washington, DC.
May 31, 2026	Joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and WiCI at Iowa State University as a Research Assistant Professor, effective July 1, 2026.

selected publications

ComNet

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

T. U. Islam, Joshua Ofori Boateng, M. Nadim, G. Zu, M. Shahid, and 29 more authors

Elsevier Computer Networks, 2025

Bib HTML

@article{islam2025ara,
  title = {Design and Implementation of {ARA} Wireless Living Lab for Rural Broadband and Applications},
  author = {Islam, T. U. and Boateng, Joshua Ofori and Nadim, M. and Zu, G. and Shahid, M. and Li, X. and Zhang, T. and Reddy, S. and Xu, W. and Atalar, A. and Lee, V. and Chen, Y. and Gossling, E. and Permatasari, E. and Somiah, C. and Perrin, O. and Meng, Z. and Afzal, R. and Babu, Sarath and Soliman, M. and Hussain, A. and Qiao, D. and Zheng, M. and Boyraz, O. and Guan, Y. and Arora, A. and Selim, M. Y. and Ahmad, A. and Cohen, M. B. and Luby, M. and Chandra, R. and Gross, J. and Keahey, K. and Zhang, H.},
  journal = {Elsevier Computer Networks},
  volume = {263},
  pages = {111188},
  year = {2025},
  issn = {1389-1286},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
}

NetSoft

AraRACH: Enhancing NextG Random Access Reliability in Programmable Wireless Living Labs

Joshua Ofori Boateng, T. Zhang, G. Zu, T. U. Islam, S. Babu, and 4 more authors

In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft). Best Paper Award , Jun 2025

Best Paper Award arXiv Bib HTML

true

@inproceedings{boateng2025ararach,
  title = {{AraRACH}: Enhancing {NextG} Random Access Reliability in Programmable Wireless Living Labs},
  author = {Boateng, Joshua Ofori and Zhang, T. and Zu, G. and Islam, T. U. and Babu, S. and Kaltenberger, F. and Schmidt, R. and Zhang, H. and Qiao, D.},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)},
  pages = {362--370},
  address = {Budapest, Hungary},
  month = jun,
  year = {2025},
}

ICC

AraSDR: End-to-End, Fully-Programmable Living Lab for 5G and Beyond

Joshua Ofori Boateng, T. Zhang, G. Zu, T. U. Islam, S. Babu, and 2 more authors

In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Jun 2024

DOI Bib HTML

@inproceedings{boateng2024arasdr,
  title = {{AraSDR}: End-to-End, Fully-Programmable Living Lab for {5G} and Beyond},
  author = {Boateng, Joshua Ofori and Zhang, T. and Zu, G. and Islam, T. U. and Babu, S. and Zhang, H. and Qiao, D.},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)},
  pages = {1758--1763},
  month = jun,
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10623061},
}

WiNTECH

AraMIMO: Programmable TVWS mMIMO Living Lab for Rural Wireless

T. U. Islam, T. Zhang, Joshua Ofori Boateng, E. Gossling, G. Zu, and 3 more authors

In Proc. ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization (WiNTECH). Best Paper Award , Oct 2023

Best Paper Award Bib HTML

true

@inproceedings{islam2023aramimo,
  title = {{AraMIMO}: Programmable {TVWS} m{MIMO} Living Lab for Rural Wireless},
  author = {Islam, T. U. and Zhang, T. and Boateng, Joshua Ofori and Gossling, E. and Zu, G. and Babu, S. and Zhang, H. and Qiao, D.},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation \& Characterization (WiNTECH)},
  pages = {9--16},
  address = {Madrid, Spain},
  month = oct,
  year = {2023},
}