The POWDER Manual

2025-01-16 (6c92194)

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The POWDER Manual

The Powder Team

Powder is a facility for experimenting on the future of wireless networking in a city-scale "living laboratory" environment. It was one of the first two platforms funded by the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), receiving support from NSF grants CNS-1827940 and CNS-2346555.

Powder is developed, deployed, and operated by the University of Utah, in partnership with the RENEW team at Rice University.

The Powder facility is built on top of Emulab and is run by the Flux Research Group, part of the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah.

1 Powder Overview

1.1 What is Powder

1.2 Powder status

1.3 Roadmap to using Powder

2 Getting Started

3 Powder starter profiles

4.1 Register for an Account

4.1.1 Join an existing project

4.1.2 Create a new project

4.1.3 Setting up SSH access

4.1.4 Setting up X11

5 Powder and Repeatable Research

6 Basic Concepts

6.2 Experiments

6.2.1 Reserving Resources for Experiments

6.2.2 Extending Experiments

6.4 Physical Resources

6.5 Virtual Machines

7 Creating Profiles

7.1 Creating a profile from an existing one

7.1.1 Copying a Profile

7.1.2 Creating the Profile

7.1.3 Updating a profile

7.2 Capturing Disk Images for Profiles

7.3 Repository-Based Profiles

7.3.1 Updating Repository-Based Profiles

7.3.2 Branches and Tags in Repository-Based Profiles

7.4 Sharing Profiles

7.5 Versioned Profiles

8.1 Radio monitoring

8.1.1 Conducted RF

8.1.2 Radiated RF

8.1.3 Massive MIMO

9 Resource Reservations

9.1 What Reservations Guarantee

9.2 How Reservations May Affect You

9.3 Making a Reservation

9.4 Using a Reservation

9.5 Who Shares Access to Reservations

10 Using Powder: From simulation, to emulation, to over-the-air

10.1 Simulated RF Experimentation

10.2 Conducted RF Environment

10.3 Using the Indoor Over-The-Air Lab

10.4 Outdoor Over-The-Air Environment

10.4.1 Step-by-step walkthrough

10.4.2 Some Important Notes

10.5 Next Steps

11 Describing a profile with python and geni-lib

11.1 A single XEN VM node

11.2 A single physical host

11.3 Two XenVM nodes with a link between them

11.4 Two ARM64 servers in a LAN

11.5 A VM with a custom size

11.6 Set a specific IP address on each node

11.7 RF communication

11.8 Specify an operating system and set install and execute scripts

11.9 Profiles with user-specified parameters

11.10 Add storage to a node

11.11 Debugging geni-lib profile scripts

12 Storage Mechanisms

12.1 Overview of Storage Mechanisms

12.2 Node-Local Storage

12.2.1 Specifying Storage in a Profile – Local Datasets

12.2.2 Allocating Storage in a Running Experiment

12.2.3 Persisting Local Data

12.3 Image-backed Datasets

12.4 Remote Datasets

12.5 NFS Shared Filesystems

12.6 Write-back Storage for Fixed and Mobile Endpoints

12.7 High-performance Storage for Streaming Data

12.7.1 Using CephFS in an Experiment

12.7.2 Limitations and Guidelines for CephFS Usage.

12.8 Storage Type Summary (TL;DR)

12.9 Example Storage Profiles

12.9.1 Creating a Node-local Dataset

12.9.2 Creating an Image-backed Dataset from a Node-local Dataset

12.9.3 Using and Updating an Image-backed Dataset

12.9.4 Creating a Remote Dataset

12.9.5 Using a Remote Dataset on a Single Node

12.9.6 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via a Shared Filesystem

12.9.7 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via Clones

13 Advanced Topics

13.1 Disk Images

13.3 Public IP Access

13.3.1 Dynamic Public IP Addresses

13.5 Introspection

13.5.1 Client ID

13.5.2 Control MAC

13.5.3 Manifest

13.5.4 Private key

13.5.5 Profile parameters

13.6 User-controlled switches and layer-1 topologies

13.7 Portal API

14 Virtual Machines

14.1.1 Controlling CPU and Memory

14.1.2 Controlling Disk Space

14.1.3 Setting HVM Mode

14.1.4 Dedicated and Shared VMs

15 Hardware and Wireless Environments

15.1 Conducted attenuator matrix resources

15.2 Paired Radio workbench resources

15.3 Indoor OTA lab resources

15.4 Rooftop Base-station resources

15.5 Dense-deployment Base-station resources

15.6 Fixed-endpoint resources

15.7 Mobile-endpoint resources

15.8 Near-edge computing resources

15.9 Cloud computing resources

16 Powder basic srsLTE Tutorial

16.1 Objectives

16.2 Prerequisites

16.3 Logging In

16.4 Creating a simple srsLTE experiment

16.5 Exploring Your Experiment

16.5.1 Experiment Status

16.5.2 Profile Instructions

16.5.3 Topology View

16.5.4 List View

16.5.5 Manifest View

16.5.6 Graphs View

16.5.8 Web-based Shell

16.6 Using the srsLTE tools

16.7 Digging deeper

16.8 Terminating the Experiment

16.9 Taking Next Steps

17 Powder OAI Tutorial

17.1 Objectives

17.2 Prerequisites

17.3 Logging In

17.4 Building Your Own OAI Network

17.5 Exploring Your Experiment

17.5.1 Experiment Status

17.5.2 Profile Instructions

17.5.3 Topology View

17.5.4 List View

17.5.5 Manifest View

17.5.6 Graphs View

17.5.8 Web-based Shell

17.6 Starting OAI Services

17.7 Connecting the UE

17.8 In-Depth OAI Profile Documentation

17.9 Terminating the Experiment

17.10 Taking Next Steps

18 Powder OpenStack Tutorial

18.1 Objectives

18.2 Prerequisites

18.3 Logging In

18.4 Building Your Own OpenStack Cloud

18.5 Exploring Your Experiment

18.5.1 Experiment Status

18.5.2 Profile Instructions

18.5.3 Topology View

18.5.4 List View

18.5.5 Manifest View

18.5.6 Graphs View

18.5.8 Web-based Shell

18.5.9 Serial Console

18.6 Bringing up Instances in OpenStack

18.7 Administering OpenStack

18.7.1 Log Into The Control Nodes

18.7.2 Reboot the Compute Node

18.8 Terminating the Experiment

18.9 Taking Next Steps

19 Citing Powder

20 Getting Help

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