This page will be updated with responses to frequently asked questions in the future. If you have questions that you could not find answers to in this user manual, please see the User Support page for different ways to contact the AERPAW team.
1) How does the workflow look like for AERPAW's "Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)" experiments?
If you are interested in BYOD experiments, our workflow includes the following process before we can approve to support your experiment over AERPAW.
Initial Plan Submission: Please submit an email to aerpaw-contact@ncsu.edu that briefly describes your BYOD experiment request. It should involve an experiment title, a short paragraph that describes the experiment, list of people who will work on the experiment and their contact information (including a main point of contact), and resources that will be used from the AERPAW platform (personnel, equipment, fixed/portable nodes, software) as well as the equipment that will be brought by the experimenters.
AERPAW Review of Initial Plan and Feedback: The AERPAW team will review the initial plan and discuss internally on the feasibility of supporting the proposed project over AERPAW. If the proposed project is found infeasible, AERPAW team will send an email to inform the main point of contact about that, along with specific reasons for why the experiment can not be supported. If such an experiment may be feasible in future phases of AERPAW, that will also be explained in the response. If in case the experiment is found potentially feasible, the AERPAW team will request a further detailed plan from the experimenters.
Detailed Plan Submission: If requested by the AERPAW team, the experimenters should submit a detailed experiment plan that describes the BYOD hardware and software to be used by the experimenters, how they will be interfacing with the other pieces in the AERPAW platform (if at all such an interface is desired), diagrams and flowcharts of the experiments' steps, safety procedures, among other details. This detailed plan will be reviewed further by the AERPAW team before proceeding with a final approval. If necessary, one or more face to face meeting(s) may be arranged with the requester. If additional development resources may be required for realizing an experiment, AERPAW may expect further development effort by the experimenter and/or additional sponsorship for in house development by the AERPAW team.
2) Do the UAV and UGV in AERPAW have CPU and/or some lightweight GPU resources? Basically, I’m interested in learning about the computing and storage capacity of UAV and UGV. Do they allow some local storage and customized computation?
For AERPAW, the vehicles are treated as extensions/capabilities of our Portable Nodes (APRNs), which represent the on-board computing you are looking for. No GPUs are supported as of December, 2021. Some details of the APRN design are in Sections 1.3 and 1.4 of the AERPAW User Manual. Customized computation is not only possible, but almost essential; while there is some sample software pre-installed on the APRNs that allows some simple operations to be performed, for any meaningful research-specific experiment, the experimenter is expected to write the code.
3) Can the UAV, UGV, SDRs, and mobile phone communicate with each other using peer-to-peer? What communication protocols are supported, WiFi, 5G?
Since the APRNs have SDRs, they can do anything you can code them to do. Sample software is provided for a few software stacks - details of what and how-to-use in Section 4 of the User Manual.
4) What types of mobile phones are supported by the platform?
As of end of Phase-1, none are provided by AERPAW; internally we know which models work with our Ericsson system and have a number of phones of such models, but since the Ericsson system is itself not available for public remote use as of end of Phase-1 (it will be part of our work during Phase-2 to make such use possible), there is no way we can let users use them. For now, the SDR (portable and fixed-on-ground) nodes are the only ones available for experimenter use. User Manual Section 1.2 shows the projected timeline of different equipment becoming available for experimenter use. It is also possible to incorporate custom devices into the testbed for supporting specific experiments, a BYOD model, but at this time our upcoming effort is so committed to further development and scaling that we probably will not be able to support BYOD efforts any time soon.
5) Can we connect the UAV, UGV, mobile phones to our own cloud, e.g. the cloud at our institution or AWS cloud?
As of end of Phase-1, this is not possible. Again, this is because AERPAW is fundamentally not a computing facility, but a physical facility, and our focus is on getting remote users experimental access to the physical resources, which consist of the airspace and the RF environment, by mediation of customs programmable devices to explore and interact with the same, namely UAVs/UGVs and SDR. Our AFRNs and APRNs provide compute capability, and in future we will also be able to provide some "backend nodes" to represent a remote cloud (but they will not be very high capacity). Connecting the physical facilities to remote compute clouds not under our control is something we don’t yet have a clear use case or model for. Down the line, we would like to understand the utility and requirements for such a scenario, however it is not on our immediate roadmap for the coming year.
6) Can I use my unmanned aircraft system to perform experiments on the AERPAW platform?
Experiments that utilize a non-AERPAW UAS will be approved on a case-by-case basis. The pilots, aircraft, and mission planning must conform to NC State Regulation 10.10.09 – Operations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems: https://oit.ncsu.edu/campus-it/rules-and-regulations/uas/. Regulation 10.10.09 covers UAS pilot requirements, notification and approval (flight plans), UAS insurance, compliance, and oversight. Please contact Thomas Zajkowski (tjzajkow@ncsu.edu) and aerpaw-contact@ncsu.edu for more information.
7) We are working on a proposal to be submitted to the National Science Foundation. We are planning to use AERPAW if our project gets funded. Can we get a collaboration letter from AERPAW to attach to our proposal?
The AERPAW operations team will be happy to support your project if it gets funded. We are actually required to support NSF-funded projects by default if they are supported under our general availability features and no separate collaboration letter is required based on the guidelines we received from the PAWR Project Office.
If your proposal is not for NSF, or if there is substantial collaboration expected beyond what is supported by the general availability features of AERPAW, please contact the AERPAW team at aerpaw-contact@ncsu.edu with a detailed description that explains how you plan to use specific features of the platform and why they can not be supported under our general availability features specified under this user manual. We would expect to meet with you and understand your requirements, and also expect a substantial description to be included within your proposal. We may also expect that you include a dedicated budget to support AERPAW platform operations outside of its general availability, especially if it involves UAV pilots and platform customization.
To understand whether your proposed work may be supported or not under our general availability, we strongly recommend that you generate an account in our experiment web portal and execute experiments in our emulation environment. Our Phase-2 features and a new version of our experiment web portal are expected to be released by May 2023. You may find substantial information about existing and upcoming sample experiments under Section 4 of this user manual.
8) I am a researcher that is employed by an institution outside of the United States. Am I eligible to access AERPAW's development and testbed environments?
AERPAW is a facility funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and one that is intended to serve the research needs of U.S. academia (especially those funded by NSF), and U.S. industry. In the long term, AERPAW (and other PAWR platforms) are going to be pay-per-use, since we have to be self-sustaining. In the initial period of NSF-funded development of the facility (which we are in currently), we have started to serve a limited number of experimenters; we are required to prioritize usage by NSF-funded U.S. academics, for whom usage is free during this initial period.
In general, we are not supporting a broad use of the platform by International (non-US) researchers, whether academia or industry, in our initial build-to-operate period, and do not expect to do so during our long-term sustainability period either. Having said that, in the spirit of being open academia, we aim to provide international researchers with provisional access to our canonical (“Program-it-Yourself”) model of usage (i.e., to experimentation using AERPAW's digital twin environment), for as much of the remaining part of the NSF-funded period. This is AERPAW's primary model of supporting experimenters, and our online User Manual and sample experiment software provide full support for this model. However, we have to make sure such international researchers understand that depending on the task load faced by the facility, we may at any time need to discontinue your access, and will certainly need to do so by project end, if not before.
Unless otherwise specified, AERPAW competitions (e.g., the AERPAW Find-a-Rover (AFAR) Challenge organized in 2023) are open by default for participation by users who are outside of the United States. Requirements and expectations in Section 2.1 of this user manual on account creation and authentication, and in Section 2.5 on acceptable use policy, still apply. Access however excludes users and entities who may be on U.S. restricted party lists, including but not limited to the U.S. Entity List released by the U.S. Department of Commerce. We will have to decline any and all platform access requests from such restricted entities.
9) How can I cite my work that uses AERPAW?
You may cite the following papers depending on the context of your work. More AERPAW publications can be found at https://aerpaw.org/publications/.
A. Panicker, O. Ozdemir, M. L. Sichitiu, I. Guvenc, R. Dutta, V. Marojevic, and B. Floyd, "AERPAW Emulation Overview and Preliminary Performance Evaluation", Elsevier Computer Communications, vol. 194, July 2021. DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2021.108083.
V. Marojevic, I. Guvenc, R. Dutta, M. Sichitiu, and B. Floyd, "Advanced Wireless for Unmanned Aerial Systems:5G Standardization, Research Challenges, and AERPAW Experimentation Platform", IEEE Vehic. Technol. Mag., vol. 15, no. 2. pp. 22-30, June 2020. DOI: 10.1109/MVT.2020.2979494.
R. Dutta, I. Guvenc, M. Sichitiu, O. Ozdemir, and M. Mushi, “AERPAW: A National Facility for Wireless and Drone Research“, IEEE ComSoc Technology News, June 2023.
10) How can I contribute to AERPAW?
Section 4 of this user manual provides various sample experiments (radio, vehicle, and traffic generation) that are provided as templates to AERPAW's users. New sample experiments will be added to Section 4 in the future as the AERPAW team integrates new capabilities to the platform.
AERPAW platform users can also contribute sample SDR experiment software to the platform if such software satisfies AERPAW platform's requirements. The provided software, if approved by the AERPAW team, will then be made available to AERPAW's users through this user manual with proper reference to contributors (and their relevant publication(s), if any). Such software should be well documented for future execution by AERPAW's user base (see here as an example), and should be tested both in AERPAW's development and testbed environments. Interested users can contact the AERPAW team at aerpaw-contact@ncsu.edu along with a description of the proposed experiment.
11) How many UAVs can the digital twin support simultaneously?
The digital twin supports "many" simultaneous UAVs (as many UAVs as AERPAW's portable nodes). We currently have in the digital twin six large portable nodes (LPNs) and three small portable nodes (SPNs) for a total of nine portable nodes. All these can be used simultaneously in the digital twin. However, in the physical testbed we cannot fly all nine portable nodes simultaneously: we currently only have three large AERPAW multicopters (LAMs) and five small AERPAW multicopters (SAMs), so at most, we may be able to fly three large portable nodes and three small portable nodes. Furthermore, while in the digital twin, all portable nodes (large and small) come equipped with SDRs, in the real testbed only the large portable nodes (and our fixed nodes) have SDRs on them, which further limits the number of simultaneous UAVs with LPNs (with SDRs) at three.
In summary, in the digital twin, you can use all nine portable nodes, but in the testbed if you want to use SDRs, the maximum is three.
12) If multiple UAVs can be supported, does the digital twin support D2D communications among the UAVs?
We have SDRs on the large portable nodes and "technically" you can use a UAV's SDR to transmit a message, and another SDR on another UAV to receive a message (see the OFDM experiment), but there is no reliable MAC protocol to coordinate these transmissions. Alternatively, you can use the large UAVs with SDRs to run 4G UE (srsRAN LTE) software and use a fixed node as a base station (you can even use a UAV as a base station) and then all UAVs can talk through the base station (as long as all are in range of each other): the 4G LTE MAC layer works well. Finally, instead of relying on large UAVs and SDRs, you can use the SAMs with 4G/5G cellular modems (COTS) that can talk to each other through the Ericsson base station we have. It is not true D2D (as it goes through the base station), but it gets the job done (it may depend on the details of the job).
13) Is there a plan for AERPAW to release digital twin APIs that would allow researchers to develop their own networking scenarios?
There are quite a bit of APIs available on our user manual: https://sites.google.com/ncsu.edu/aerpaw-user-manual/
For example, for UAVs we have two sets of APIs (more if you want to dig deeper):
aerpawlib: https://morzack.github.io/aerpawlib-vehicle-control/
DroneKit: https://dronekit.io/
A couple of useful utilities (likely to be useful when you get further in):
For the rest, the APIs are (should be!) the same as for the real setup. For example, for the SDRs in the digital twin we use UHD the same as for the SDRs in the testbed - exactly the same APIs are used for both environments (and that's why you do not need to change the software from the digital twin to the testbed and back).
14) How do I provide an acknowledgment to AERPAW in my conference or journal publication?
Please include an acknowledgment to the following award number: NSF CNS-1939334.