Distribution Statement A – Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited

www.darpa.mil

The Colosseum RF TestbedA Colossal research environment for next generation radio technology.

Colosseum is the worlds largest RF emulator designed to support research and development of large-scale, next generation radio network technologies in a repeatable and highly configurable RF environment. It combines 128 Software Defined Radios with a massive digital channel emulator backed by an extensive FPGA routing fabric. Accessible as a cloud-based platform Colosseum also provides other resources to create a real-time, largescale radio employment such as traffic generation, timing, and GPS synthesis.

It’s Really Big• 26 GHz total instantaneous bandwidth• 256 inputs X 256 outputs x 100MHz• Full-mesh capable• 52 TB/s of digital RF data• 64 Virtex-7 core computation

Colosseums 21 Racks of RF and Support hardware“Web Services” for ensemble spectrum AI

sc2colosseum.com

To make Colosseum possible hand optimization of the FPGA code was required yielding:• 88% DSP resource utilization• 76% of RAM resources utilization• 400MHz overclocked FPGA

It takes a data center:

Requirements

Specifications

Operations

Data Center Footprint• 21 Racks of radios, FPGAs, server and support equipment• 65Kwatts of power• 40Tons of HVAC

Operates 24x7x365• Jobs are scheduled using a simple web interface• Users may operate interactively or schedule batch jobs• Tokens are distributed weekly for interactive jobs• Users are allocated storage for results collection

Software Defined Radio Resources

Channel Emulator Characteristics• Accommodate real radio hardware• Provide repeatable environment (RF, traffic, etc.)• Support large scale testing, up to 256 radio nodes• Real-time emulation of realistic RF channel conditions

Concept of Operations

• Remote shared access via internet to experiment at any time from anywhere without human intervention

• Self-contained, flexible radio definition• Broad range of experiment design choicesUse Cases• Virtualized Radio Research Environment• Largescale comms testbed (cost effective alternative to

Network Integration Experiment)• Spectrum sharing test & evaluation proving ground

Specifications• 128 2x2 MIMO Tx/Rx Ports• Phase Coherent• Bandwidth : 80 MHz BW• Tunable: 10 MHz to 6GHz• 4 tap PDP emulation• (10ns resolution, 5us max delay, 1

kHz updates)