ARA-OTIC is an O-RAN Open Testing and Integration Centre (OTIC) hosted by the Center for Wireless, Communities, and Innovation (WiCI) at Iowa State University (ISU). Leveraging ARA, the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) project on rural broadband, ARA-OTIC focuses on advancing the frontier of O-RAN through research and open-source initiatives, and it facilitates O-RAN adoption via real-world evaluation, demonstration, and pilot of O-RAN systems with applications in the loop.
Besides typical OTIC facilities, ARA-OTIC provides an at-scale, field-deployed experimental infrastructure for research and innovation in far-edge wireless systems and their applications in precision agriculture, community services, and so on. In particular, ARA-OTIC features the first-of-its-kind, real-world deployment of long-range, high-capacity wireless x-haul and access platforms in agriculture and rural settings, ranging from the state-of-the-art crop and livestock farms to rural cities and including user equipment such as agriculture vehicles, robots, drones, sensors, as well as public safety vehicles and facilities. With wireless x-haul platforms operating at the 11 GHz, 71-86 GHz, and 194 THz bands and offering communication capacities up to 160 Gbps at distances up to 15 Km, the ARA x-haul exemplifies low-cost, high-capacity middle-mile solutions connecting remote rural communities and agriculture farms to the nearest wired Internet backbone. With 5G-and-beyond Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems operating at the 460-776 MHz, 3.4-3.6 GHz, and 27.5-28.35 GHz bands and with 14, 192, and 384 antenna elements per sector, respectively, the ARA radio access network (RAN) exemplifies massive MIMO wireless access platforms that offer high capacity and large cell radius through beamforming, thus reducing the required spatial density of RAN base stations and cost of rural wireless. Besides the aforementioned large-scale outdoor wireless infrastructure and the associated edge and cloud computing resources, ARA-OTIC also operates an indoor sandbox for testing and integration purposes.
Contact: otic@arawireless.org