ARA Wireless Living Lab Paper Published in Computer Networks

The paper “Design and Implementation of ARA Wireless Living Lab for Rural Broadband and Applications” (Taimoor Ul Islam et al.) has been published in Computer Networks, Vol. 263, Article 111188 (May 2025). ARA is a first-of-its-kind wireless living lab for rural broadband research, deployed across farms, communities, and roads in central Iowa, integrating high-capacity x-haul, programmable base stations, and even low-earth-orbit satellite links to support applications from precision agriculture to rural connectivity. A free, publicly available version is posted as an arXiv preprint.

ARA is a great example of our infrastructure work reaching beyond Chameleon: the testbed uses a derivative of CHI@Edge to manage its experiments, extending the same edge-to-cloud experiment model we described in our PEARC’25 CHI@Edge paper to a live, at-scale rural wireless environment. If you are interested in running experiments on real edge hardware, you can learn more about CHI@Edge and get started on the Chameleon site.

Image: ARA deployment overview, courtesy of the ARA Wireless Living Lab.