“Systems R&D requires experiments”
In our opinion there is no way out of it, if you want to research systems or educate the future experts in that area one requires experimental capabilities.Because of this we have heavily invested to laboratory enviroment and devices in iNETS, and have access to some very unique capabilities provided in larger scale by RWTH and our collaborators.
At our own building we have large research laboratory space and two large laboratories that are used both for teaching and research. Apart of these larger laboratory areas we have two smaller lab rooms and operate also quite large wireless testbeds.
“We love baloons”
We have a very large number of signal analyzers and signal sources that can literally generate and detect signals from very low frequencies upto 110 GHz. In 2015 we finalised a major investment for 60-80 GHz mm-wave testbed. We have a large-scale software defined radio networking capabilitiey build aroung USRP and WARP devices, for which we have over 50 items available both for research and teaching purposes. Similarly we have capability for radar testing in the context of different communications systems. I big part of the future is mobilty and communications in extreme enviroments. We are certainly ready for that, we have access to closed motorway circuits to test high speed vehicular scenarios, or as you can see on the left hand side, if you want to send your radio to 25km up we can do it with out modified weather balloons.
“The Mo(o)re the Merrier”
Often the scaling is very important when testing different scenarios, and this is particularly true when one is experimenting with Internet of Things (IoT) or ultra dense future networks. We have over 200 embedded tiny computers, such as Arduinos and Rasberries, that can be used as wireless sysems platform to test all kind of scenarios. Even more fun is tha we have reserved similar platforms for teaching for students to innovate new cool scenarios and applications. We also like Moore’s law. A lot of our work requires heavy number crunching for solving propagation equations, making network simulations of city sized LTE and IoT networks, or even asking what you would do with planetary size sensor network. Apart of having access through Jülich to some of the largest super computers in the world, we have also our own sever room full of hundreds of computing cores ready to solve our esoteric problems.