This open-access, wireless testing platform features 32 software-defined radios and 64 antennas in a ceiling-mounted grid. Arena’s scale and computing power are fostering the development of new technologies in the crowded sub-6 GHz 5G spectrum bands and new applications of AI and machine learning to wireless systems.
Northeastern is home to the Colosseum, the world’s largest radiofrequency channel emulator. Developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Colosseum will enable the building and testing of intelligent, autonomous, collaborative wireless technologies for military and commercial use. This “electronic arena” can mimic, in real time, tens of thousands of RF channel interactions among hundreds of wireless devices within a square kilometer. Through AI, radios that weren’t designed to work together can now learn to do so by optimizing the limited capacity of the electromagnetic RF spectrum.
This indoor-outdoor laboratory, located at Northeastern’s Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts, consists of an anechoic chamber/Faraday cage and a 150’ x 200’ x 60’ netted area for testing unmanned aerial and ground technologies, antennas, and navigation and communications equipment.
The TeraNova platform is the world’s first integrated testbed for ultra-broadband communication networks in the terahertz (THz) band. The platform consists of several transmit and receive nodes with radio-frequency (RF) front-ends able to operate at frequencies up to 1.05 THz (i.e., true THz), and digital signal processing (DSP) back-ends or engines able to process up to 32 GHz of bandwidth.
09/15/20 - BOSTON, MA. - Josep Jornet Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering conducts research in the ISEC building on Sept. 15, 2020. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University