1 Powder Overview
1.1 What is Powder
Powder is a remotely accessible "living laboratory" to enable mobile and wireless research. Powder is deployed in a "real world" environment/configuration with radio equipment, fiber infrastructure, edge-compute and datacenter/cloud resources deployed in a "city-scale" platform.
Powder promotes the progression of work from simulation, to emulation, and finally to over-the-air environments, both indoor and outdoors. This workflow allows experimenters to test and refine ideas and prototypes within controlled and predictable scenarios, and then "graduate" to using over-the-air resources once the basics are working.
In concert with broad industry trends towards network "softwarization", and to provide the greatest flexibility in terms of the research that can be enabled, Powder is an end-to-end software-defined-infrastructure. Specifically, Powder uses off-the-shelf hardware (software-defined-radios (SDRs), general purpose compute, state-of-the-art networking etc), and pairs that with a variety of software stacks to enable specific functionality of interest to platform users.
The Powder SDR infrastructure, combined with low level SDR specific and generic radio software form the basis for wireless communication research (e.g., dynamic/shared spectrum use, novel radio frequency waveforms to improve spectral efficiency, spectrum monitoring, signal classification, etc.)
The Powder SDR, COTS O-RU and UE, edge-compute and datacenter/cloud infrastructure, combined with srsRAN or Open Air Interface 5G software stacks enable end-to-end mobile networking research (e.g., radio access network (RAN) and core network (CN) protocol analysis, enhancement and evolution, cross-layer approaches to enhance performance, tradeoffs related to different RAN fronthaul splits, mobile network management and operations research etc.)
The Powder SDR, edge-compute and datacenter/cloud infrastructure, combined with network service platform, policy driven orchestration, edge compute, or RAN ecosystem software stacks enable edge compute, RAN virtualization, network-function-virtualization (NFV) and orchestration research, (e.g., scalability/performance/management of virtualized network platforms, use cases/applications/service abstractions enabled by network softwarization, edge compute abstractions, uses cases and scalability etc.)
In addition to the above end-to-end software-defined infrastructure, Powder also has purpose built infrastructure to enable massive MIMO (mMIMO) related research. Specifically, Powder contains mMIMO base-stations and endpoints from Skylark Wirelss and mMIMO specific software from our RENEW partners. The equipment enables a broad range of mMIMO research, including beamforming, scheduling, interference management etc. More details on the mMIMO equipment and software is available on the RENEW website.
Note that Powder provides example profiles for many of the scenarios described above. (Powder profiles are "recipes" that describe the hardware and software needed to enable specific scenarios and can be programmatically "instantiated" into experiments that can be used as a starting point for research.)
Finally, Powder also enables "bring-your-own-device" related research. Specifically, the Powder platform is designed and built to allow third-party equipment to be deployed anywhere in the overall Powder architecture, and be integrated with the rest of the platform and its experimental workflow.
1.2 Powder status
Powder is deployed and operational on the campus of the University of Utah. A map of our current deployment is here. (A schedule outlining our further deployment plans is available from the Powder portal.)
More detailed information on the equipment and configuration of the current deployment is described in the hardware chapter.
Using Powder is free for NSF funded academics. Short term use of the platform by other users (non-NSF funded academic use, industry or government use etc.), for the purpose of evaluating the platform, is also free. Use of the platform beyond such short-term evaluation will require payment. Rates and pricing are available by following this link. Please contact powder-contact@powderwireless.net to inquire about commercial use.
1.3 Roadmap to using Powder
The Powder platform is a sophisticated instrument and it is often confusing for new users to understand what it is and how it can be used. Below is a suggested "roadmap" for exploring Powder.
If you are new to Powder, the getting started exercise is a good place to begin. This activity will walk you through the basic Powder experimental workflow (creating a user account and joining an existing project, instantiating an experiment, interacting with your instantiated experiment, terminating your experiment etc.) You should only need a web browser (Chrome generally works well) for this activity.
Once you have completed your account setup, you should read through Powder basic concepts and mechanisms in more detail (i.e., basic platform concepts, the profile mechanism, resource reservations, using python and geni-lib in your profiles, etc. In order to use Powder it will also be useful to understand details about the platform hardware and configuration.
Using a browser to interact with the resources in your experiment is convenient for trying things out, but for most Powder users setting up ssh access to the platform and enabling X11 will be necessary.
The basic srsRAN tutorial chapter provides a step-by-step activity for instantiating the open source srsRAN 5G software stack with a simulated RF configuration.
Powder’s conducted RF environment, featuring a programmable attenuator matrix, is demonstrated by the SRS RF matrix profile. This profile also shows how handover can be performed in a controlled manner.
Check out the O-RAN profile for an in-depth exploration of the O-RAN ecosystem on Powder, as well as the NEXRAN radio resource slicing mechanism.
When you are ready to venture into the over-the-air environment, our recommended starting point is the Powder indoor OTA lab. The SRS indoor OTA profile shows you how to run an end-to-end 5G experiment with srsRAN in the indoor OTA lab.
Access to over-the-air (OTA) radio resources in Powder is enabled on a per project basis. Also, OTA operation in may require radio resources to be reserved ahead of time. The over-the-air operation exercise provides a step-by-step walkthrough of the Powder over-the-air experimental workflow.
The CloudLab Manual provides step-by-step exercises for instantiating Kubernetes as well as the OpenStack cloud platform. These virtual machine/container stacks can be instantiated directly on Powder and used with Powder’s resources.
The chapter on Powder profiles provides descriptions of a number of different "starter" profiles that might be useful for bootstrapping your use of the platform.