Arena is an open-access wireless testing platform based on a grid of antennas mounted on the ceiling of a large office-space environment. Each antenna is connected to programmable software-defined radios (SDR) enabling sub-6 GHz 5G-and-beyond spectrum research. With 12 computational servers, 24 SDRs synchronized at the symbol level, and a total of 64 antennas, Arena provides the computational power and the scale to foster new technology development in some of the most crowded spectrum bands. Arena is based on a three-tier design, where the servers and the SDRs are housed in a double rack in a dedicated room, while the antennas are hung off the ceiling of a 2240 square feet office space and cabled to the radios through 100 ft-long cables. This ensures a reconfigurable, scalable, and repeatable real-time experimental evaluation in a real wireless indoor environment.

In this paper, we introduce the architecture, capabilities, and system design choices of Arena, and provides details of the software and hardware implementation of various testbed components. Furthermore, we describe key capabilities by providing examples of published work that employed Arena for applications as diverse as synchronized MIMO transmission schemes, multi-hop ad hoc networking, multi-cell 5G networks, AI-powered Radio-Frequency fingerprinting, secure wireless communications, and spectrum sensing for cognitive radio.

Arena是一个开放式无线测试平台，其基于安装在大型办公空间天花板上的天线网格。每个天线都连接到可编程软件定义的无线电（SDR），可进行低于6 GHz的5G及以上频谱研究。凭借12个计算服务器，24个SDR在符号级别同步以及总共64根天线，Arena提供了计算能力和规模，以促进在一些最拥挤的频段中进行新技术的开发。Arena基于三层设计，其中服务器和SDR安装在专用房间的双机架中，天线悬挂在2240平方英尺办公室空间的天花板上，并通过100英尺电缆连接到收音机长电缆。这样可以确保可重配置，可扩展，

在本文中，我们介绍了Arena的体系结构，功能和系统设计选择，并提供了各种测试平台组件的软件和硬件实现的详细信息。此外，我们通过提供已发表的工作实例来描述关键功能，这些工作已采用Arena应用于各种应用，例如同步MIMO传输方案，多跳自组网，多小区5G网络，人工智能供电的射频指纹识别，安全的无线通信，认知无线电的频谱感应。