COSMOS³ Community Workshop on Next-Generation Testbed Capabilities

Upper mid-band radio, a channel-calibrated digital twin, and street-level sensing decide what the next generation of COSMOS experiments can be. A requirements workshop, not a showcase: the output is what each of the three has to become next.

In person at WINLAB, Rutgers University. No registration fee · Zoom link on request.

Where COSMOS is today

Upper mid-band. A bookable FR3 sandbox: Pi-Radio heterodyne front ends in SB1, 2×2 TX/RX, IF interface to USRP-2974 SDRs, wideband Vivaldi antennas, up to 160 MHz of signaling with precise gain and LO control. First measurements at 10–10.5 and 12.2–12.7 GHz, bookable now via sb1.cosmos-lab.org, with four published tutorials.

The digital twin. A 3.5 GHz sounding campaign — 20 positions, 16 for training and 4 held out — feeds measured channel impulse responses into NVIDIA AODT and Sionna RT, so the twin is calibrated against the street rather than assumed. Duke’s Geo2SigMap builds scenes from open map data and trains a cascaded U-Net purely on synthetic ray-traced data, predicting RSRP to 6.04 dB RMSE — 3.59 dB better than statistical, ray-tracing and prior ML methods.

Street-level sensing. The next-generation medium node carries six modalities on one time-aligned data plane — lidar, thermal, 4 MP RGB, a 16-channel acoustic array, air quality and climate, and UWB anchors. ISAC runs on 28 GHz phased arrays, with every dataset published out to the Smart Streetscapes community.

Draft program

11:30 – 12:00 · Registration and light lunch

12:00 – 12:15 · Welcome and the COSMOS³ roadmap — Ivan Seskar, Rutgers/WINLAB

12:15 – 12:45 · FR3 and the next-generation node

12:45 – 1:10 · Scalable Wireless Digital Twins and Machine Learning for High-fidelity RF Signal Mapping — Tingjun Chen, Duke University

1:10 – 1:50 · Keynote: FR3: why now — Sundeep Rangan, Director, NYU WIRELESS

1:50 – 2:00 · Break

2:00 – 2:25 · Dynamic Spectrum Access research in the COSMOS PAWR — Carlos Caicedo, Syracuse University

2:25 – 2:50 · Securing Smart Cities with COSMOS: From Real-Time Video Analytics to Trusted Navigation — Jhonatan Tavori, Columbia University

2:50 – 3:05 · Networking in a Quantum COSMOS — John Louis Drogo, Columbia University

3:05 – 4:00 · Demo break

4:00 – 5:00 · What do you need next in COSMOS? — one open session, everyone in the room

5:00 – 6:00 · Reception — joint with W4AI attendees arriving for Friday

6:30 onwards · Dinner (off-site) — optional, separate free ticket.

The closing session covers all three threads: A. Upper mid-band — front ends, antennas, calibration, 1 GHz end-to-end · B. Digital twin — scene fidelity, channel calibration, shared scenarios, reproducibility · C. Street-level sensing and ISAC — modalities, ground truth, coexistence and outdoor authorization.

Dinner. An optional dinner follows the reception. Book it as a separate free ticket on this page — places are limited to 40. If you are attending only the Friday W4AI workshop you can still book dinner here; it is not offered on the Friday page.

Call for participation

Bring the experiment you cannot run yet. On the table:

• Antennas and arrays across 7–24 GHz — what designs, and from whom?
• 1 GHz end-to-end — full-bandwidth sounding implies at least 25 GbE (realistically 100 GbE) fronthaul, with storage and compute to match.
• Twin fidelity — what error, against what measurement, makes a simulated result publishable?
• Sensing and ground truth — which modalities, at what rate, labeled how?
• Coexistence and incumbents — what must a testbed demonstrate to earn outdoor FR3 authorization?

To propose a topic for the session, email help@cosmos-lab.org with a title and two sentences.

Staying for Friday?

The STAIRWAI to COSMOS: Wireless for AI (W4AI) Workshop runs the next day, Friday 18 September 2026, at the same venue — a full day on making AI applications wireless-native. Register for both: eventbrite.com/e/1998936130777

Organizers

Organized by the COSMOS³ team — Ivan Seskar (PI, Rutgers), Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers), Gil Zussman (Columbia), Zoran Kostić (Columbia), Tingjun Chen (Duke).

Supported by NSF award 2450567, CIRC: ENS/Grand: COSMOS³ — Enhancing and Sustaining the COSMOS Platform. More at cosmos-lab.org and wiki.cosmos-lab.org.