About

What Gaia Lab is #

Gaia Lab is the 5G and B5G technology experimentation laboratory of the ANTS group at the University of Murcia. Our motto, Driving connectivity, sums up what we do: deploying, measuring and putting next-generation networks to the test on real infrastructure, and carrying that connectivity all the way to the edge, whether that is a sensor, a roadside unit or a moving vehicle.

At Gaia Lab we work on several research lines that build on one another: 5G and B5G networks, vehicular communications, perception, the Internet of Things and edge computing. Much of what we publish on this blog comes from the tests and demonstrations carried out in European and national projects such as R3CAV, UNICO5G-CERBERUS, NANCY, 5GASP and EMPYREAN.

The ANTS group #

ANTS is a research group in the Department of Information and Communications Engineering at the University of Murcia. Gaia Lab is its experimentation laboratory: the place where the group’s proposals in networking, edge computing and connected mobility are deployed on real equipment and validated with measurements, rather than staying in simulation.

The Espinardo Campus infrastructure #

The ANTS group has deployed a private 5G SA network on the Espinardo Campus, with several gNBs spread across campus buildings and built on software-defined radio and commercial equipment, together with C-ITS/V2X units, LoRaWAN IoT gateways at 868 MHz and a programmable backbone with 100 Gbps links between sites. This infrastructure is backed by three data centres (ATICA, PLEIADES and GAIA) with more than 1,500 CPUs and close to 15 TB of RAM, orchestrated with Proxmox, OpenStack, OSM and Kubernetes.

The experimental vehicle #

Our experimental vehicle is a mobile laboratory built on a Corvus Terrain EX4 electric UTV, into which we have integrated a 3D LiDAR, high-precision GNSS, on-board computing, 5G, IoT and V2X connectivity and a multispectral camera. It is the mobile edge of the campus’s private 5G network and lets us check, on the move and on real terrain, how applications that depend on connectivity behave; it can also deploy a tactical network on its own for tests and emergencies.

About this blog #

This blog is our public lab notebook. Here we collect working notes, measurement results, guides to using the infrastructure and the demonstrations that come out of the lab, with the aim of being useful both to those who collaborate with us and to anyone who wants to reproduce what we do.

The site is built with Hugo , a static site generator, and is published on GitLab Pages through GitLab’s continuous integration: every change that reaches the repository’s main branch regenerates the site and publishes it, while the other branches are only built for review. Posts are Markdown files inside the content/posts folder, and the complete source code (templates, styles, content and the deployment configuration) lives in the project repository.

Contact and links #

To find out more about the lab, the group or the university, these are the reference pages:

The group’s contact channels can be found on the ANTS website. If a post on this blog contains an error or there is something to correct, the project repository is the right place to report it.