ARA Wireless Living Lab

NSF PAWR — an at-scale rural wireless living lab spanning central Iowa

ARA is one of the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) sites, and the only one built around rural and agricultural communities. It spans more than 60 km across Iowa State University, the City of Ames, nearby research and producer farms, and rural towns throughout central Iowa — so experiments run under genuine rural conditions: long-distance links, open-field propagation, weather, and mobility, rather than the controlled setting of an indoor lab.

The platform is intentionally heterogeneous. It combines mid-band and mmWave 5G, massive MIMO, TV white-space, and free-space optical links, all backed by edge and cloud compute over a mix of fiber, microwave, and optical x-haul. Researchers anywhere in the country can reserve resources, deploy a full software stack, and collect real-world measurements through a self-service workflow.

I lead the design, deployment, and day-to-day operation of ARA — building out its programmable 5G/6G and Open RAN infrastructure and supporting the 170+ researchers across the U.S. who run experiments on it.

  Links