AraMIMO: Programmable TVWS mMIMO Living Lab for Rural Wireless.

Rural broadband is critical to industries and community services such as precision agriculture, renewable energy, and rural education. Yet 39% of rural US and over 4 billion people around the world still lack broadband access. Addressing the challenge requires rural-focused technology research and innovation that provide high-capacity, long-range connectivity to sparsely populated areas at an affordable cost. To this end, we design, implement, and deploy AraMIMO, the first-of-its-kind TV White Space (TVWS) many-antenna MIMO (mMIMO) living lab for rural wireless research, education, and innovation. As a key part of the ARA PAWR infrastructure, AraMIMO features the field-deployed multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) system, Skylark Faros V2, exploiting the TVWS spectrum to provide high-capacity connectivity over large geographical areas of radius up to 10 km. With rich APIs to monitor and control the behavior of production-grade mMIMO systems, AraMIMO integrates programmability with high performance, and, with its user-friendly experimentation workflow and remote access support, AraMIMO serves as an invaluable living lab for rural wireless and applications. Measurement studies have demonstrated great promise, for instance, having achieved a single-sector spectral efficiency of 16 b/s/Hz with a 6 MHz TVWS channel and 6 clients in real-world rural settings. AraMIMO also enables interesting wireless experiments such as characterizing the impact of multi-user beamforming on network capacity, as well as application experiments such as agriculture automation.