¶ COSMOS Testbed Wiki
Welcome to the user wiki for the COSMOS (Cloud-enhanced Open
Software-defined MObile wireless testbed for city-Scale deployment) and
ORBIT (Open-access Research testbed for next-generation wireless
networks) testbeds. This site is the operational reference: how to reserve
nodes, image them, run experiments, and build on top of the testbed
infrastructure.
New here? Start with Getting Started —
account creation, your first reservation, and a five-minute end-to-end
experiment. Already have an account? Jump straight to the
scheduler or the
portal dashboard.
¶ Overview
The COSMOS (Cloud enhanced Open Software defined MObile wireless
testbed for city-Scale deployment) project is aimed at the design,
development, and deployment of an advanced wireless city-scale testbed to
support real-world experimentation on next-generation wireless
technologies and applications.
The COSMOS testbed is deployed in West Harlem, New York City, with a
technical focus on ultra-high-bandwidth and low-latency wireless
communication tightly coupled with edge computing, and an emphasis on
millimeter-wave (mmWave) radio and dynamic optical switching. A set of
indoor sandboxes at WINLAB, Rutgers (New Jersey) and the original
ORBIT testbed share the same portal, scheduler, and control framework.
Looking for principal investigators or publications beyond the citation
below? See the project site at
www.cosmos-lab.org. The rest of this
wiki is the user-facing how-to (the mandatory publication citation is
included below, in Acknowledging COSMOS).
¶ What's on the testbed
COSMOS spans both regions described in the Overview above, all reachable
through the same portal, scheduler, and OMF control plane. ORBIT is the
original NJ-only sister testbed that shares the same framework and
remains in active use.
You can compose experiments from any combination of:
- Software defined radios — USRP X310 / N310 / X410 with FPGAs (RFNoC) for
tight-loop processing, plus B210, N210, and 2974 / 2974R RF systems-on-module. - mmWave (28 GHz) — IBM dual-polarisation phased-array transceivers
(PAAM) on the West Harlem rooftops and at WINLAB. - O-RAN / 5G — O-RAN-compliant 7.2x O-RUs at multiple NYC sites plus
programmable srsRAN / OpenAirInterface stacks running on edge servers. - Edge compute — rack-mounted servers (Intel Xeon and NVIDIA A100 80 GB
GPUs) co-located with the radio sites, along with a dedicated GPU sandbox
(nebula) for ML workloads. - Optical x-haul — OpenROADM ROADM nodes and FibroLan PTP-aware Ethernet
switches connecting the rooftop sites back to the data centre. - Smart-intersection sandbox — vehicle-and-roadside-unit testbed with
cameras, lidar, and 5 GHz / mmWave radios at the Rutgers Livingston
campus intersection. - Free-space optical and visible-light — FSO links and VLC
transceivers for non-RF experimentation. - Domain sandboxes — single-purpose environments (
sb1,sb2,sb3,
accord,osc,weeks,rrail,nebula,bed,
instrument) you can reserve in isolation without conflicting with the
main grid.
Hardware-by-hardware detail lives under
Hardware; pre-built disk images, OMF tools, and
portal services are documented under Software.
¶ How experiments work
A typical session on COSMOS or ORBIT looks like:
- Reserve a window on a node, sandbox, or domain through the
scheduler. The grid and
high-demand sandboxes have wall-clock reservations; dedicated domains use
weekly or project-level allocations. - Connect to the corresponding console host over SSH (or the
in-portal SSH
shortcut). Each domain has its own console. - Image the nodes you want from the disk-image library:
omf load -i <image-name> -t <topology-or-node-list> - Run your experiment. Most users drive nodes either with OMF (the
ORBIT/COSMOS control framework —omf tell,omf exec) or with
Ansible playbooks against the imaged hosts. - Save any modified image with
omf save, collect results, and release
the reservation.
The full workflow with worked examples is on the
Getting Started page; common command
recipes are in the OMF Commands reference.
¶ Documentation map
| Section | What's there |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | Account creation, first reservation, first experiment, reduced setup for FR3 / advanced features |
| Tutorials | Step-by-step walkthroughs — wireless basics, SDR experiments, edge computing, O-RAN, smart-intersection |
| Hardware | Per-device specs and topologies for grid, sandboxes, dedicated domains, and the NYC outdoor deployment |
| Software | Disk-image catalogue, OMF tooling, scheduler, portal services, and pre-installed stacks |
| Datasets | Published reproducible datasets generated on the testbed |
| Storage | Per-user, per-group, and shared storage layout (NFS, TrueNAS) |
¶ Programs
| Program | Pages |
|---|---|
| Summer Internship | Per-year project pages (2015 – 2025) with abstracts, posters, and presentations |
| Workshops (historical) | Slides, agendas, and materials from past tutorials and workshops |
¶ Project workspaces
Group-private wikis for ongoing projects live under
/wiki/projects/<name>/. These are visible only to members of the
corresponding LDAP group.
- DARPA Spectrum Challenge — historical match-execution
framework and tournament tutorials.
¶ Support
- Forum — ask the community,
share tips, browse past discussions. - Status — live testbed
health (per-node uptime, sandbox readiness, image-server status). - Email —
support@cosmos-lab.orgfor testbed access issues, account
problems, or hardware-fault reports.
If a documentation page is wrong or out of date, you're already signed in —
click Edit and fix it. Anyone with a testbed account can edit the
public sections.
¶ Acknowledging COSMOS
COSMOS — Cloud enhanced Open Software defined MObile wireless
testbed for city-Scale deployment — is a joint project of Rutgers,
Columbia, and NYU with New York City, CCNY, Silicon Harlem,
the University of Arizona, and IBM, funded by the U.S. National
Science Foundation (NSF) under the Platforms for Advanced Wireless
Research (PAWR) program.
If you publish results obtained using the COSMOS testbed, please cite:
D. Raychaudhuri, I. Seskar, G. Zussman, T. Korakis, D. Kilper, T. Chen,
J. Kolodziejski, M. Sherman, Z. Kostic, X. Gu, H. Krishnaswamy,
S. Maheshwari, P. Skrimponis, and C. Gutterman, "Challenge: COSMOS: A
city-scale programmable testbed for experimentation with advanced
wireless," in Proc. ACM MobiCom '20, 2020.
DOI: 10.1145/3372224.3380891
Please also acknowledge NSF PAWR support in any resulting publications. See
RF Policies & Compliance for
spectrum-use rules and testbed usage policy.