AERPAW User Manual

Welcome to the tutorial sessions at AERPAW Community Workshop 2025 !

Internet Access

You need unrestricted Internet access from the laptop you will be accessing AERPAW from.

Please make sure to attach to the eduroam WiFi network, if you have an eduroam profile set up on your computer at your home institution.

If you do not have eduroam, request a dongle from one of the tutorial coordinators, and a set of instructions for installing the driver on Windows or MacOS (on Linux it should work automatically). Then connect to the ncsu WiFi network.

If you have not already, go to https://go.ncsu.edu/acw23-tutorial to access this Tutorial Information document.

Self-guided, self-paced tutorial

The ACW tutorials are designed to be completely self-guided. With the information provided to you through the AERPAW User Manual, you can traverse the tutorials entirely by yourself. In fact, you do not need to be at ACW to do so.

The benefit of attending the tutorial sessions at ACW '23 is that you can get instant, personalized help from AERPAW personnel, standing by for that purpose, if any of the instructions or material in the User Manual is unclear, or if you face problems as you attempt to traverse the steps specified.

The User Manual is organized in pages or sections. At the top left of the Navigation Bar, there is an icon with three horizontal lines that indicates a pull-down menu - this menu allows you to visit any section in the User Manual. This page itself is part of the User Manual, so you can access that menu from this page itself.

Custom Disposable Tutorial Environment

You can stop your traversal at any time, and come back to it later, during ACW '23.

However, please keep in mind that during the ACW '23 event, you will be using a completely equivalent but distinct parallel Virtual Environment than the Production AERPAW system for the tutorials. Therefore, the User registrations, Experiments, and any custom code you develop during the tutorials will not persist after the conclusion of ACW '23 ; they will all be deleted.

If you want to save any custom code you have developed during the tutorials, please do so; the easiest way to do so is probably cut-and-paste locally into your laptop. (If you believe your code is too voluminous for that, but worth saving, please get in touch with a tutorial coordinator to explore possible alternate options.)

Install Software

For various tutorials, you will need to install various software on your laptop if you do not already have them installed. You may do this up front, or as you come to them during the course of the tutorials.

In case you would like to install all the software beforehand, here is the list of necessary software:

OpnVPN (on Linux or Windows - for Linux make sure it is openvpn version 2), or Tunnelblick (on MacOS). (See Section 2.6 of AERPAW User Manual for instructions, if you need.)
Some application that lets you run Secure Shell (ssh) sessions - native on Linux, on Windows apps like MobaXTerm, PuttY, etc.
QGroundControl (See Section 3.1.1 of AERPAW User Manual for instructions).
MATLAB local install/license (or access to an institutional license server) - optional but highly desirable.

Preliminaries

Familiarize yourself with AERPAW by reading Section 1 of the AERPAW User Manual.

The overview video included in the front material of Section 1 may be helpful to view.

Please pay special attention to Section 1.8, which reviews the complete workflow.

Please ask a tutorial coordinator if any part of the User Manual is unclear, or you encounter any difficulty with any of the steps, in this and all subsequent steps.

Using Custom Event Web Portal

Although the AERPAW User Manual provides a well-known URL for the AERPAW Web Portal, for the ACW '23 event we are using a custom Portal, so as to avoid potentially affecting in-production AERPAW experiments due to the tutorial activity.

Instead of the URL given in the User Manual, use the Portal at the following URL:

https://152.14.188.14:8443/

Note: This Portal is equivalent to the production AERPAW Portal, but uses self-signed certificates, so you will receive a "Not Secure" message from your OS or browser. You should ignore this, and proceed.

User Registration, Role, Project

Follow the procedure provided in Section 2.1 to register yourself as an AERPAW User.

Follow the procedure provided in Section 2.2 to request the Experimenter Role.

This video may be helpful to view.

Once the request is granted, follow the procedure provided in Section 2.3 to join the Project "ACW Tutorial Project".

Create a Single Experiment

You will create an AERPAW "Experiment" that you will work with in Development Mode through the various tutorial sessions. It is important that you create no more than a single experiment during ALL the tutorial sessions you attend. DO NOT create more than one Experiment. This single Experiment will allow you to explore all the various tutorials.

This will not only save you a lot of time and effort at each tutorial, but also the AERPAW substrate is likely to run short of resources if attendees create more than one Experiment each.

Follow the procedure provided in Section 2.4 to create an Experiment of your own. In the step to choose Experiment Target Resources, choose the AFRN "LW1", and an APRN "LPN1".

This video may be helpful to view.

Login to Your Virtual Experiment

Follow the procedure provided in Section 2.6 to access the virtual versions of your target AERPAW Nodes.

This video and this video may be helpful to view.

End of Common Part

You have to perform the procedure above before you can follow up with any of the tutorials. You have to do this only once.

No matter what tutorial session you first attend, please follow the procedure above up to this point.

If you attend multiple sessions, for sessions after the first one, you can start with the specific tutorial below.

Tutorial 1: Vehicle Control

Read the instructions in Sections 3.2 (you can skip "Setting up the Radio Script" and "Setting up the Traffic Script" at this time), 3.4, and 4.2.1 , and attempt to follow these procedures in your Experiment. The following videos help with these sections respectively.

This video will be helpful to view to understand OEO.

This video will be helpful to view to understand Sample Experiment structure.

This video will be helpful to view to understand vehicle trajectory specification.

Tutorial 2: srsRAN LTE (SE1) and GNU Radio OFDM (GE1)

Again, refer to Section 3.2, this time read the two sections you skipped last time. This video and this video will be helpful.

Follow Section 4.1.1 (SE1 subsection) to perform the Sample Experiment SE1.

This video and this video will be helpful.

Follow Section 4.1.3 (GE1 subsection) to perform the Sample Experiment GE1.

This video and this video will be helpful.

Tutorial 3: GNU Radio Channel Sounding (GE2)

Follow Section 4.1.3 (GE2 subsection) to perform the Sample Experiment GE2.

This video will be helpful.

Tutorial 4: I/Q Sample Collection (UHD2) with srsRAN LTE (SE1) and srsRAN 5G (SE6)

Follow Section 4.1.4 to see how I/Q sampling data can be collected from Sample Experiments SE1 and SE6, and how to post-process that data meaningfully.

This video and this video will be helpful for the SE1 collection and post-processing.

This video and this video will be helpful for the SE6 collection and post-processing.

Welcome to the tutorial sessions at AERPAW Community Workshop 2025 !

Internet Access

Self-guided, self-paced tutorial