About ORBIT

This project was started in 2003 with a major grant from the NSF Networking Research Testbeds (NRT) program. The goal was to develop a large-scale wireless network testbed to facilitate a broad range of experimental research on next-generation protocols and application concepts. The ORBIT (Open Access Research Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Networks) system consists of an indoor "radio grid emulator" for large-scale reproducible experiments, and an outdoor "field trial system" for subsequent real-world evaluations. A 400-node radio grid emulator has been set up in a dedicated 5000 sq-ft facility located at the WINLAB Tech Center building in North Brunswick in ~2004-05. The ORBIT radio grid was released for general use by the research community in Oct 2005, and has served over 500 research groups worldwide conducting a variety of experiments including mobile ad hoc networks, dynamic spectrum coordination, network virtualization, wireless security and vehicular networking. The testbed also serves as a proof-of-concept prototyping platform for wireless aspects of the ​NSF Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) future Internet infrastructure. An outdoor field trial network has also been set up with ORBIT nodes deployed at the WINLAB Tech Center and Busch campus.