13 Hardware

13.1 Base-station resources

Each Powder base station site includes a collection of software defined radio devices from National Instruments (NI) connected to Commscope and Keysight antennas. A handful of sites (one now, and three later) include massive MIMO equipment from Skylark Wireless. Each device has one or more dedicated 10G links to aggregation switches at the Fort Douglas aggregation point. These network connections can be flexibly paired with compute at the aggregation point or slightly further upstream with Emulab/CloudLab resources.

• Antennas (connectivity defined in SDR equipment section)

  • 1 x 10-port Commscope VVSSP-360S-F multi-band

    • 360 horizontal beamwidth, ~20 degree vertical

    • 8.2 dBi gain from 2.3 - 2.69 GHz

    • 4.9 dBi gain from 3.4 - 3.8 GHz

    • 4-port MIMO-capable Cellular elements (1695 - 2690 MHz)

    • 4-port MIMO-capable CBRS elements (3400 - 3800 MHz)

    • 2-port 5 GHz elements (5150 - 5925 MHz)

    • Specifications Website

  • 1 x 1-port broadband Keysight N6850A omnidirectional

    • 50 - 6000 MHz

• NI SDR Equipment

  • Note: The current configuration is described below. This is expected to change in the coming months as NI N310 units are brought online and RF front-end circuits are completed and deployed (ETA Sept. 2019).

  • 2 x USRP X310 with UBX160 daughtercards

    • Channel ’A’ TX/RX and RX2 ports of device 1 through a frontend to a Cellular port of VVSSP-360S-F

    • Channel ’A’ TX/RX port of device 2 on a CBRS port of VVSSP-360S-F

    • RF front-end for Band 7 cellular providing FDD, reduced noise figure and 4W maximum (saturated) power

    • No add-on RF front-ends for gain/functionality yet in CBRS

    • 2 x 10 Gbe backhaul links

  • Keysight (broadband) antenna currently unavailable.

• Skylark Wireless Massive MIMO Equipment

  Skylark equipment consists of chains of multiple radios connected through a central hub. This hub is 64x64 capable, and has 4 x 10 Gbe backhaul connectivity. Powder provides "big iron" compute (Dell d840 nodes, see compute section) for pairing with the massive MIMO equipment.

  • Note: Available at Merrill Engineering Building site

  • 32 x IRIS-030-D 2x2 transceiver radios

    • Includes IRIS-FE-03-CBRS front-end modules

    • • BRS and CBRS capable: 2555 - 2655, 3550 - 3700 MHz

      • 26 dBm, 2 x 2 TDD

    • Connected to dual-polarized antenna elements

      • 100 degree beamwidth, 5.5 dBi

  • 1 x FAROS-ENC-05-HUB aggregation hub

    • Provides power and connectivity to all IRIS SDRs

    • The 32 SDRs are connected in six chains to hub

      • 4 chains have 4 Iris devices each

      • 2 chains have 8 Iris devices each (extended chains)

      • 13.2 Gbps connectivity across individual chains

    • Trenz TE0808 SOM with XC7U9EG MPSoC

• Upcoming changes: By Spring 2020, Powder base station sites will include 4 x NI SDR devices each; two USRP X310 SDRs (with UBX160 daughtercards), and two USRP N310 SDRs. Custom, band/radio-specific RF front-ends will be included. Each SDR will be dedicated to a particular band: One N310 for 4 x 4 Cellular access (Commscope VVSSP-360S-F); One N310 for 4 x 4 CBRS access (VVSSP-360S-F); One X310 for 2x2 5 GHz band access (VVSSP-360S-F); One X310 for broadband access (Keysight N6850A). The custom RF front-ends will have PA and LNA components with 2W peak power, and both TDD and FDD paths available. The particulars of these front-ends will be made available as the designs are completed and tested.

13.2 Fixed-endpoint resources

Each Fixed Endpoint (FE) installation in POWDER contains an ensemble of software defined radio (SDR) equipment from national Instruments (NI) with complementary small form factor compute nodes. There is no wired backhaul, though the platform does provide seamless access via cellular/WiFi to resources in an FE installation. Endpoints are mounted at human height level on the sides of buildings.

• Antennas

  • 1 x Taoglas GSA.8841 wideband I-bar antenna

    • 698 - 6000 MHz frequency range

    • Approximately -2 dBi average gain across range

    • Specifications Document

• NI SDR Equipment

  • Note: The current configuration is described below. This is expected to change in the coming months as RF front-end circuits are completed and deployed.

  • 1 x NI USRP B210 SDR on nuc1

    • Channel ’A’ RX2 port connected to dedicated GSA.8841 antenna

    • Connected via USB 3.0 to NUC host (described below)

    • Specification Document

    • Manual

  • 1 x NI USRP B210 SDR on nuc2

    • Channel ’A’ connected to Band 7 FDD frontend

    • RF front-end provides FDD, reduced noise figure and 4W maximum (saturated) power

    • Connected via USB 3.0 to NUC host (described below)

    • Specification Document

    • Manual

• Intel NUC Compute

  • 1 x Intel NUC8i7BEH small form factor PC

    • Intel Core i7-8559U

    • 32 GB RAM (2 x 16GB Corsair Vengeance 2400 MHz DDR4 SODIMM)

    • 250 GB NVMe storage (Kingston)

    • Specification Document

13.3 Skylark IRIS Endpoints

Skylark IRIS SDRs are deployed as endpoints in two eastern facing offices of the Merrill Engineering Building. These are connected via 1 Gbps copper links.

• Skylark SDR Equipment

  • 1 x IRIS-030-D

    • Includes IRIS-FE-03-CBRS front-end modules

      • BRS and CBRS capable: 2555 - 2655, 3550 - 3700 MHz

      • 26 dBm, 2 x 2 TDD

    • Vendor Info

13.4 Near-edge computing resources

The following resources are connected to the Powder base-stations via 100Gb links in an aggregation point at the Fort Douglas datacenter.

All nodes are connected to two networks:

• A 10 Gbps Ethernet “control network”—this network is used for remote access, experiment management, etc., and is connected to the public Internet. When you log in to nodes in your experiment using ssh, this is the network you are using. You should not use this network as part of the experiments you run in Powder.

• A 10/40 Gbps Ethernet “experimental network”. Each d740 node has two 10Gb interfaces, one connected to each of two Dell S5248F-ON datacenter switches. Each d840 node has two 40Gb interfaces, both connected to the switch which also hosts the corresponding mMIMO base station connections.

The two S5248F-ON switches are connected to a third S5248F-ON "aggregation" switch via 2 x 100GbE links each. All three switches host 10Gb connections from the eight roof-top base-stations. The aggregation switch also hosts 100Gb uplinks to the MEB and DDC datacenters that contain further Powder resources and uplinks to Emulab and CloudLab.

13.5 Cloud computing resources

In addition, Powder can allocate bare-metal computing resources on any one of several federated clusters, including CloudLab and Emulab.