Colosseum: Large-Scale Wireless Experimentation Through Hardware-in-the-Loop Network Emulation

TL;DR

Colosseum is a large-scale, open-access wireless testbed that enables realistic, high-fidelity experimentation with virtualized radio environments using hardware-in-the-loop emulation, supporting diverse wireless research scenarios.

Contribution

This paper introduces Colosseum as the first open, large-scale wireless testbed with FPGA-based emulation for realistic environment modeling and experimentation.

Findings

Demonstrated effectiveness in cellular and Wi-Fi spectrum sharing scenarios.

Enabled testing of UAV communication systems at scale.

Showcased high-fidelity emulation of real-world wireless channels.

Abstract

Colosseum is an open-access and publicly-available large-scale wireless testbed for experimental research via virtualized and softwarized waveforms and protocol stacks on a fully programmable, "white-box" platform. Through 256 state-of-the-art software-defined radios and a massive channel emulator core, Colosseum can model virtually any scenario, enabling the design, development and testing of solutions at scale in a variety of deployments and channel conditions. These Colosseum radio-frequency scenarios are reproduced through high-fidelity FPGA-based emulation with finite-impulse response filters. Filters model the taps of desired wireless channels and apply them to the signals generated by the radio nodes, faithfully mimicking the conditions of real-world wireless environments. In this paper, we introduce Colosseum as a testbed that is for the first time open to the research community. We describe the architecture of Colosseum and its experimentation and emulation capabilities. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of Colosseum for experimental research at scale through exemplary use cases including prevailing wireless technologies (e.g., cellular and Wi-Fi) in spectrum sharing and unmanned aerial vehicle scenarios. A roadmap for Colosseum future updates concludes the paper.