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Section: New Software and Platforms
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Reproducible research Lab - R2lab
Scientific work around network protocols and related software stacks requires experiments, hence experimental conditions, to be reproducible. This is a particularly challenging requirement in the wireless networking area, where characteristics of wireless channels are known to be variable, unpredictable and hardly controllable.
The R2lab wireless testbed was designed with reproducibility as its central characteristics; it is built around an isolated and anechoic chamber, featuring RF absorbers that prevent radio waves reflections, and a Faraday cage blocking external interferences. R2lab thus provides an ideal environment for running reproducible wireless experiments.
R2lab has been operated for 4 years now, in the context of the FIT (Future Internet of Things) Equipment of Excellence project, and as such, it is now federated with the other testbeds that are part of the FIT initiative. As of early 2019, it is now also federated within the Fed4Fire initiative.
Available toolsets, both hardware and software, are mostly stable apart from low noise marginal deployment of new kinds of radio devices, that now encompass among 5G and LoRa, among others. Our focus at this point of the project is to leverage our initial technical and financial investment, and to produce scientific work around reproducibility, particularly from a methodological standpoint, as illustrated by various publications [33], [34].
Worth being mentioned as well, as part of a partnership with the OpenAirInterface initiative, R2lab is used on a daily basis for system-wide regression tests of the OAI stack, which in return allows us to offer up-to-date images for running OAI-based experiments.
Access to R2lab is open 24/7. We currently have around 200 active users from all over the world among them 40 new users registered in 2019. For more details see http://r2lab.inria.fr.