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While millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless has recently gained tremendous attention with the transition to 5G, developing a broadly accessible experimental infrastructure will allow the research community to make significant progress in this area. Hence, in this paper, we present the design and implementation of various programmable and open-access 28/60 GHz software-defined radios (SDRs), deployed in the PAWR COSMOS advanced wireless testbed. These programmable mmWave radios are based on the IBM 28 GHz 64-element dual-polarized phased array antenna module (PAAM) subsystem board and the Sivers IMA 60 GHz WiGig transceiver. These front ends are integrated with USRP SDRs or Xilinx RF-SoC boards, which provide baseband signal processing capabilities. Moreover, we present measurements of the TX/RX beamforming performance and example experiments (e.g., real-time channel sounding and RFNoC-based 802.11ad preamble detection), using the mmWave radios. Finally, we discuss ongoing enhancement and development efforts focusing on these radios.

Social distancing can reduce infection rates in respiratory pandemics such as COVID-19, especially in dense urban areas. To assess pedestrians’ compliance with social distancing policies, we use the pilot site of the PAWR COSMOS wireless edge-cloud testbed in New York City to design and evaluate an Automated video-based Social Distancing Analyzer (Auto-SDA) pipeline. Auto-SDA derives pedestrians’ trajectories and measures the duration of close proximity events. It relies on an object detector and a tracker, however, to achieve highly accurate social distancing analysis, we design and incorporate 3 modules into Auto-SDA: (i) a calibration module that converts 2D pixel distances to 3D on-ground distances with less than 10 cm error, (ii) a correction module that identifies pedestrians who were missed or assigned duplicate IDs by the object detectiontracker and rectifies their IDs, and (iii) a group detection module that identifies affiliated pedestrians (i.e., pedestrians who walk together as a social group) and excludes them from the social distancing violation analysis. We applied Auto-SDA to videos recorded at the COSMOS pilot site before the pandemic, soon after the lockdown, and after the vaccines became broadly available, and analyzed the impacts of the social distancing protocols on pedestrians’ behaviors and their evolution. Formore »example, the analysis shows that after the lockdown, less than 55% of the pedestrians violated the social distancing protocols, whereas this percentage increased to 65% after the vaccines became available. Moreover, after the lockdown, 0-20% of the pedestrians were affiliated with a social group, compared to 10-45% once the vaccines became available. Finally, following the lockdown, the density of the pedestrians at the intersection decreased by almost 50%.« less

This paper describes a wireless experimentation framework for studying dynamic spectrum access mechanisms and an experiment that showcases its capabilities. The framework was built on COSMOS, an advanced wireless testbed designed to support real-world experimentation of next generation wireless technologies and applications. Our deployed framework supports experimentation over a large number of wireless networks, with a PUB-SUB based network interaction structure, based on the Collaborative Intelligent Radio Networks (CIRN) Interaction Language (CIL) developed by DARPA for the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). As such, it enables interaction and message exchanges between the networks for the purposes of coordinating spectrum use. For our experiment, the message exchanges are aimed primarily for, but not limited to, Spectrum Consumption Model (SCM) messages. RF devices/systems use SCM messages which contain detailed information about their wireless transmission characteristics (i.e., spectrum mask, frequency, bandwidth, power and location) to determine their operational compatibility (non-interference) with prior transmitters and receivers, and to dynamically determine spectrum use characteristics for their own transmissions.