Communication Systems and Networks lab

This lab contains hardware and equipment to perform experiments in the area of communication systems and networks. Primarily, a fully configurable physical computer network, programmable wireless radios, IoT devices, and a high-performance computer for heavy computations, data analysis, and machine learning.

A large part of the lab is our fully configurable computer lab room and its wired network, which we can set up and use to test different configurations using programmable routers and switches. This includes using smart routers that enable packet capture and network surveillance when performing experiments. The network also has access to a number of public IP addresses, which are available for experiments on the public Internet through the university’s high-speed fiber network. We also have a secondary fiber network available through our collaboration with RISE and their fiber testbed. Which enables experiments across multiple administrative domains at the same time.

Another large part of this lab consists of our equipment for wireless communication and software defined radios. We also have a number of different programmable radio hardware systems that can be used for research and experiments on the more physical aspects of radio communication. Some of which are especially adapted for Industrial applications and harsh environments, which can be brought out for field tests in factories.

We also have a large amount of typical IoT devices that can be used for experiments that require many devices. For example, distributed systems and fog/mist computing research. These include a large amount of Raspberry Pi single board computers, Arduino units, Android mobile phones, and Contiki wireless sensor motes, as well as many different off the shelf electronic sensors, actuators, and other small electronics equipment, soldering, etc.

Finally, we perform research into applied machine learning, data analysis, and AI, for which high performance computing sometimes is necessary. In addition to having access to the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) we also locally have our own high end server machine to perform calculations that require heavy computation power, but not a full data center. Currently this machine has an I7 6850k and carries 128 GB of RAM and three high end graphics cards (one RTX 3090 OC and two TITAN X cards).