The POWDER Manual

2025-03-11 (096c600)

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The POWDER Manual

The Powder Team

Powder is a facility for experimenting on the future of wireless networking in a city-scale "living laboratory" environment. It was one of the first two platforms funded by the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), receiving support from NSF grants CNS-1827940 and CNS-2346555.

Powder is developed, deployed, and operated by the University of Utah, in partnership with the RENEW team at Rice University.

The Powder facility is built on top of Emulab and is run by the Flux Research Group, part of the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah.

1 Powder Overview

1.1 What is Powder

1.2 Powder status

1.3 Roadmap to using Powder

2 Getting Started

3 Powder starter profiles

4.1 Register for an Account

4.1.1 Join an existing project

4.1.2 Create a new project

4.1.3 Setting up SSH access

4.1.4 Setting up X11

5 Powder and Repeatable Research

6 Basic Concepts

6.2 Experiments

6.2.1 Reserving Resources for Experiments

6.2.2 Extending Experiments

6.4 Physical Resources

6.5 Virtual Machines

7 Creating Profiles

7.1 Creating a profile from an existing one

7.1.1 Copying a Profile

7.1.2 Creating the Profile

7.1.3 Updating a profile

7.2 Capturing Disk Images for Profiles

7.3 Repository-Based Profiles

7.3.1 Updating Repository-Based Profiles

7.3.2 Branches and Tags in Repository-Based Profiles

7.4 Sharing Profiles

7.5 Versioned Profiles

8.1 Radio monitoring

8.1.1 Conducted RF

8.1.2 Radiated RF

8.1.3 Massive MIMO

9 Resource Reservations

9.1 What Reservations Guarantee

9.2 How Reservations May Affect You

9.3 Making a Reservation

9.4 Using a Reservation

9.5 Who Shares Access to Reservations

10 Using Powder: From simulation, to emulation, to over-the-air

10.1 Simulated RF Experimentation

10.2 Conducted RF Environment

10.3 Using the Indoor Over-The-Air Lab

10.4 Outdoor Over-The-Air Environment

10.4.1 Step-by-step walkthrough

10.4.2 Some Important Notes

10.5 Next Steps

11 Describing a profile with python and geni-lib

11.1 A single XEN VM node

11.2 A single physical host

11.3 Two XenVM nodes with a link between them

11.4 Two ARM64 servers in a LAN

11.5 A VM with a custom size

11.6 Set a specific IP address on each node

11.7 RF communication

11.8 Specify an operating system and set install and execute scripts

11.9 Profiles with user-specified parameters

11.10 Add storage to a node

11.11 Debugging geni-lib profile scripts

12 Storage Mechanisms

12.1 Overview of Storage Mechanisms

12.2 Node-Local Storage

12.2.1 Specifying Storage in a Profile – Local Datasets

12.2.2 Allocating Storage in a Running Experiment

12.2.3 Persisting Local Data

12.3 Image-backed Datasets

12.4 Remote Datasets

12.5 NFS Shared Filesystems

12.6 Write-back Storage for Fixed and Mobile Endpoints

12.7 High-performance Storage for Streaming Data

12.7.1 Using CephFS in an Experiment

12.7.2 Limitations and Guidelines for CephFS Usage.

12.8 Storage Type Summary (TL;DR)

12.9 Example Storage Profiles

12.9.1 Creating a Node-local Dataset

12.9.2 Creating an Image-backed Dataset from a Node-local Dataset

12.9.3 Using and Updating an Image-backed Dataset

12.9.4 Creating a Remote Dataset

12.9.5 Using a Remote Dataset on a Single Node

12.9.6 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via a Shared Filesystem

12.9.7 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via Clones

13 Advanced Topics

13.1 Disk Images

13.3 Public IP Access

13.3.1 Dynamic Public IP Addresses

13.5 Introspection

13.5.1 Client ID

13.5.2 Control MAC

13.5.3 Manifest

13.5.4 Private key

13.5.5 Profile parameters

13.6 User-controlled switches and layer-1 topologies

13.7 Portal API

14 Virtual Machines

14.1.1 Controlling CPU and Memory

14.1.2 Controlling Disk Space

14.1.3 Setting HVM Mode

14.1.4 Dedicated and Shared VMs

15 Automating Experiments

15.1 Portal API

15.2 Runtime Configuration: Ansible

15.2.1 Ansible extensions to geni-lib

15.2.2 Bootstrapping Ansible in Experiments

15.2.3 Automating Ansible Configuration in Experiments

15.2.4 Example: workflow-manager profile

15.2.5 Example: Kubernetes profile

16 Hardware and Wireless Environments

16.1 Conducted attenuator matrix resources

16.2 Paired Radio workbench resources

16.3 Indoor OTA lab resources

16.4 Rooftop Base-station resources

16.5 Dense-deployment Base-station resources

16.6 Fixed-endpoint resources

16.7 Mobile-endpoint resources

16.8 Near-edge computing resources

16.9 Cloud computing resources

17 Powder basic srsLTE Tutorial

17.1 Objectives

17.2 Prerequisites

17.3 Logging In

17.4 Creating a simple srsLTE experiment

17.5 Exploring Your Experiment

17.5.1 Experiment Status

17.5.2 Profile Instructions

17.5.3 Topology View

17.5.4 List View

17.5.5 Manifest View

17.5.6 Graphs View

17.5.8 Web-based Shell

17.6 Using the srsLTE tools

17.7 Digging deeper

17.8 Terminating the Experiment

17.9 Taking Next Steps

18 Powder OAI Tutorial

18.1 Objectives

18.2 Prerequisites

18.3 Logging In

18.4 Building Your Own OAI Network

18.5 Exploring Your Experiment

18.5.1 Experiment Status

18.5.2 Profile Instructions

18.5.3 Topology View

18.5.4 List View

18.5.5 Manifest View

18.5.6 Graphs View

18.5.8 Web-based Shell

18.6 Starting OAI Services

18.7 Connecting the UE

18.8 In-Depth OAI Profile Documentation

18.9 Terminating the Experiment

18.10 Taking Next Steps

19 Powder OpenStack Tutorial

19.1 Objectives

19.2 Prerequisites

19.3 Logging In

19.4 Building Your Own OpenStack Cloud

19.5 Exploring Your Experiment

19.5.1 Experiment Status

19.5.2 Profile Instructions

19.5.3 Topology View

19.5.4 List View

19.5.5 Manifest View

19.5.6 Graphs View

19.5.8 Web-based Shell

19.5.9 Serial Console

19.6 Bringing up Instances in OpenStack

19.7 Administering OpenStack

19.7.1 Log Into The Control Nodes

19.7.2 Reboot the Compute Node

19.8 Terminating the Experiment

19.9 Taking Next Steps

20 Citing Powder

21 Getting Help

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