Collaborative Research: CIRC: Dev: UnionLabs: Facilitating Shared Access to Heterogeneous Wireless Testbeds Through Grassroots-Driven Federation

The wireless research community continues to face major challenges in conducting rigorous, repeatable experiments to evaluate next-generation wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Existing testbeds are limited in availability and often fixed to specific environments, making it difficult for researchers to test how their innovations perform under different conditions. This project addresses these challenges by creating UnionLabs, a new cloud-based federation of wireless testbeds that aims to democratize access to experimental research resources. By enabling seamless remote access to testbeds distributed across multiple U.S. institutions, UnionLabs promotes wider participation in wireless research. It also helps accelerate research in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) for autonomous systems, mobile edge computing, and spectrum sharing. Through integration into university courses, hands-on training opportunities, and public workshops, UnionLabs supports both workforce development and broader engagement. The project establishes an innovative two-tier infrastructure that combines a centralized public cloud platform with edge computing resources located at individual testbed sites. A federation plane hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables seamless integration and remote access to geographically distributed experimental facilities through a unified web-based interface. To validate and demonstrate the scalability of this platform, UnionLabs will federate testbeds across four institutions with complementary strengths including University at Buffalo (5G and UAV systems), University of Florida and University of Utah (IoT technologies), and Northeastern University (programmable 5G and beyond systems). The platform’s standardized federation APIs will support easy onboarding of additional grassroots testbeds over time, laying the foundation for a dynamic and sustainable national research infrastructure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.