The bed is COSMOS' city-scale outdoor deployment: roughly one square mile of West Harlem, NYC — City College to the north, Columbia's Morningside Heights campus to the south — designated an FCC Innovation Zone. It puts programmable software-defined radios, mmWave front-ends, optical x-haul and edge compute on real rooftops and street corners in a dense urban RF environment. This is the domain experiments graduate to after development on a sandbox.
Reserve bed.cosmos-lab.org in the scheduler (up to 6 hours) and work from console.bed.cosmos-lab.org.
| Site | Location | What's there |
|---|---|---|
| co1 (core 1) | Columbia CS building (CRF) | Core compute — colocation servers srv1-co1…srv6-co1, testbed aggregation |
| co2 (core 2) | 32 Avenue of the Americas datacenter | Fiber interconnect point (x-haul, peering) |
| lg1 (large 1) | Columbia Mudd building, 18th-floor rooftop | Three sector installations (s1–s3), each with an SDR pair; edge servers srv1-lg1…srv4-lg1 |
| lg2 (large 2) | CCNY North Academic Center rooftop | Three sector slots (s1–s3-lg2); edge servers srv1-lg2…srv4-lg2 |
| md1 (medium 1) | Mudd building street level, 120th Street | Street-level SDR pair |
| md2 (medium 2) | Mudd building 2nd floor, Amsterdam Avenue | Street-level SDR pair |
| md3–md6 | CCNY / street-level sites | Additional medium SDR slots |
| — | Mudd 12th floor (Amsterdam Ave & 120th St) | Streaming cameras overlooking the intersection |
Per current inventory, the fully active SDR slots are s1-lg1, s2-lg1, s3-lg1, md1 and md2; the lg2 and md3–md6 slots are installed or in provisioning. Check live status with omf stat -t all from the console or the portal status page.
Every SDR slot is a pair of co-located radios sharing antennas and a GPS reference:
sdr1-<site> — Ettus USRP N310 (4 RF channels, embedded ARM Linux). Inventory type rfdevice; reached over the data network from the paired host or the site's edge servers.sdr2-<site> — NI USRP-2974 — an X310-class radio with an integrated x86 host (Ubuntu, PCIe transport). Inventory type node; you image and log into it like any other node.Both radios at a slot feed the site's RF front end: two user-switchable TX chains (+30 dB PA, 2–8 GHz, up to +30 dBm — band selection is policy-controlled, see RF policies) and two always-connected RX chains (900 MHz–6 GHz on large-site sectors, 1.7–6 GHz on medium sites). The antennas page covers the radiating elements.
Things every bed experimenter should know:
sdr1) powers its LNA. If you power sdr1-* off, the paired sdr2-* loses GPS and its GPSDO needs 15–30 minutes of uninterrupted power to relock. Keep the sdr1 head-end on whenever you need GPS discipline on the pair.uhd_usrp_probe calls can keep it from ever locking. Prefer external 10 MHz + PPS from the N310, or minimize UHD invocations while waiting for lock.The bed hosts 28 GHz IBM phased-array antenna modules (PAAMs) — see PAAM subsystem — plus Sivers mmWave front-ends and the InterDigital edge-link rooftop pair. These are reserved as part of the bed domain; their control interfaces are documented on the subsystem pages.
Each large site carries four edge servers (srv1–srv4-lg1/lg2) for RF processing close to the radios; the core (co1) adds colocation servers srv1-co1–srv6-co1. Sites are fiber-connected through the optical fabric (ROADM-based x-haul to the core and on to co2), so optical-wireless x-haul experiments can reconfigure the topology end-to-end.
ssh <user>@console.bed.cosmos-lab.org # during your reservation
omf stat -t all --summary # what's up
omf load -t sdr2-s1-lg1 -i baseline-sdr.ndz # image the 2974 host
omf tell on -t sdr2-s1-lg1
Node naming is <function>-<sector>-<site>: sdr2-s1-lg1 is the 2974 at large-site 1, sector 1; srv3-lg2 is edge server 3 at large-site 2. sdr1-* radios are not imaged — they are network-attached USRPs used from the paired host or edge servers.
Because this is an outdoor deployment in a live city, RF transmission rules are strict: stay inside the allowed bands and power limits in the RF policies, and be reachable at your registered contact while transmitting.
Draft generated 2026-08-28 from live inventory, deployment records and the RF front-end documentation — corrections from the operations team welcome.