AERPAW Emulation Overview

The Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) has been recently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program. The AERPAW platform will enable experiments with programmable radios and programmable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), conducted in a safe and repeatable manner. Several architectural components are crucial for enabling the envisioned capabilities of the testbed. In this paper, after providing a high level overview of AERPAW, we first present the emulation design of AERPAW vehicles. Subsequently, we describe various different options for wireless channel emulation in AERPAW. We start with a generalized model for wireless emulation, and expand that model to packet-level emulation, I-Q level emulation, and radio-frequency (RF)-level emulation. A discussion on the trade-offs among these various different emulation possibilities is also provided.