Highlights and Materials from the PAWR PI Meeting 2026
Principal Investigators (PI’s) from the four Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) testbeds, along with researchers, users, government leaders, and other members of the advanced wireless community gathered in Washington DC for the 2026 PAWR PI Meeting.
The meeting featured remarks from government representatives, presentations from the platforms, and details on research performed by platform users. The gathering’s purpose was to celebrate the advancements made over PAWR’s 10 years and catalyze collaboration among attendees.
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Meeting Highlights
Research and Platform Presentations
The PAWR platforms provided an overview of their testbed capabilities, outreach efforts, and impact. Research presentations complemented these updates with concrete examples of how the testbeds enable advanced wireless experimentation and support real-world research.
POWDER
The POWDER platform supports reproducible experimentation through enhanced radio deployments, dynamic spectrum management with OpenCMS, and data commons that help researchers share and repeat experiments.
Research presentations:
- Zhi-Li Zhang, University of Minnesota – Teleoperating Autonomous Vehicles over Commercial 5G Networks: Are We There Yet?
- Imtiaz Karim, UT Dallas – Securing Cellular and Open RAN Systems through Real-World Experimentations
COSMOS
COSMOS -is a city-scale programmable advanced wireless testbed. Key technologies include software-defined radios (SDRs), mmWave radios, optical transport network, among others.
Research presentation:
- Carlos Caicedo, Syracuse University – Spectrum Management REsearch in COSMOS
AERPAW
AERPAW is a first-of-its-kind aerial wireless experimentation platform that is now a formal service center with the ability to invoice users and support testing, consulting, and lab use.
Research presentations:
- William Bjorndahl, Southern Methodist University – RF-Native Research via AERPAW
- Prasad Calyam, University of Missouri – RoutePEARL: Route Planner for Efficient Aerial and Road Logistics
ARA
This living lab for NextG and agriculture/rural communities proves a real-world, at-scale testbed with terrestrial wireless access, x-haul, and edge compute, and satellite communications. ARA brings together ecosystem stakeholders across academia, industry, government and communities.
Research presentation:
- Tianyu Zhang, University of Iowa – ARA: Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities
Houdini
Houdini offers a software-defined radio system to support emerging bands, enable simultaneous access to multiple bands of interest, empower research communities in wireless networking, sensing and imaging, and enable diverse datasets to support advanced AI/ML research
Expert Panels
RF Data Solutions
Kaushik Chowdhury moderated a panel featuring Dustin Maas, Tingjun Chen, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ismail Guvenc, and Hongwei Zhang. Together they explored how the platforms are collecting, storing, publishing and leveraging RF data.
Government Panel
Voices from various federal agencies joined the PAWR community for a discussion about the future of wireless research. The participants included Paul Ransom, NTIA; Deep Medhi, NSF; Nada Golmie, NIST; Brian Stone, FutureG. The discussion was moderated by Mari Silbey, PAWR Program Director.
Research on Display: Poster Presentations
During the meeting’s poster session, users and researchers shared 18 projects and abstracts with the meeting participants. Dive into each abstract and poster below.
AERPAW
- Ali Gurbuz | Abstract | Poster
- Mahfizur Khan | Abstract | Poster
- Mohammadreza Barzegaran | Abstract | Poster
- William Bjorndahl | Abstract
- Yekta Demirci | Abstract
ARA
COSMOS
- Boulat Bash | Abstract | Poster
- John Sonchack | Abstract | Poster
- Jungjun Park | Abstract
- Kun Woo Cho | Abstract | Poster
- Mehmet Turkcan | Abstract
POWDER
- Hakan Gulec | Abstract
- Imtiaz Karim | Abstract
- Sadia Afrose | Abstract | Poster
- Taqi Raza | Abstract
- Tariq Abdul-Quddoos | Abstract | Poster
Leverage the PAWR Platforms
The PAWR testbeds offer researchers a unique testing environment for conducting advanced wireless research and experimentation at scale.
Explore the next step of using a PAWR platform based on your research needs!
