The validation of wireless communications research, whether it is focused on PHY, MAC or higher layers, can be performed in several ways, each with its limitations. Simulations tend to be simplified. Equipping wireless labs requires funding and usually incurs significant delays to acquire and setup the hardware. Remotely accessible testbeds, that offers testbed hardware as a service, present a good, cheap, and immediate alternative to validate research. The existing testbeds have gone a long way in building the infrastructure for managing and operating themselves. Yet, there is still space to improve the administration of resources whether it is nodes, frequency spectrum or storage space. In this proposal, we build on our successful contributions of Phase I of the CRC testbed, the first wireless testbed in Egypt and the region that enables web/remote access to facilitate research experiments in the field of wireless communications and networks. Specifically, we present the proposed features and research plan of Phase II of the project. CRC started in Oct. 2014 as a project funded by the fourth cycle of NTRA research grants. It is built upon the contributions made by current testbeds and incorporates new features to improve the user experience and ameliorate the management of resources. CRC has been built to advance the research and teaching of wireless communication and networking and has contributed to the wireless testbeds community knowledge by its new features. It enables multiple simultaneous users to coexist in the testbed by enforcing an elaborate node isolation policy. Software dedicated to the enforcement of spectrum assignment was developed to further ensure the isolation between concurrent users. A tool that is capable of realizing a desired topology using gain control was developed. CRC also operates a scheduler that optimizes node assignment to maximize testbed utilization. Enhancements to disk image saving to reduce the required storage are being developed. Other than research, CRC targets contributing to the education of wireless communications and networks by providing pre-built experiments and a web interface dedicated to students and teachers. CRC has been used in a number of wireless networking research projects and taught courses within the team and other universities in Egypt. In addition, we carried out a number of workshops as well as community-reach campaigns. In the first phase of this project, the focus was to build a wireless testbed that has a scalable and modular architecture with variety of wireless interfaces and enable web/remote access to the testbed to facilitate research experiments in the field of wireless communication and networking especially for Egyptian researchers and practitioners. During the first phase, 8 USRP-based software defined radio nodes connected to WiFi-enabled mini-desktops is installed and integrated with the testbed management framework. Powerful servers have been used to host the front-end and back-end testbed components and to operate as a simulation server for larger-scale experiments. Different software and hardware components have been developed and installed to enable the testbed planned features and functionalities. Some components have been built using existing open-source frameworks/tools/software to facilitate the future integration with other testbeds, which is one of the features of Phase II of the project. Several research challenges have been investigated and solutions have been developed and integrated in our testbed including virtualization of the testbed resources, non-conflict scheduling of parallel experiments, efficient operating system image swapping and transfer, among others. In the second phase, the focus of this proposal, we will continue some tasks that have been started but not yet finished and investigate more features that are needed including integration with other testbeds/sites as support as well as extension to the current one (for speeding and scaling experiments), multi-testbed inter-operability, cross running of experiments over multiple testbeds, testbed to simulation script translations, real-time measurements and control for dynamic experiments, realistic mobility emulation and management, malicious user detection, knowledge sharing platform for researchers and instructors to share research code and labs, incorporation of an 8 antenna base station, and integration between the teaching labs/portal and the Moodle Learning Management System. These tasks will be prioritized with feedback from the NTRA and the Egyptian research community. Such features will allow a wide set of applications beyond the current capabilities and will have a huge impact on different sectors of the society, not only in Egypt, but through the region and internationally. Once completed, the proposed work will add to the body of knowledge in mobile wireless networking research and testbeds with novel techniques for interaction and integration between different testbeds with heterogeneous components and simulators. Moreover, the project has a far reaching effect on other fields of knowledge. In particular, the developed protocols/APIs/testbed will allow for better understanding of the different aspects of building a real testbed with heterogeneous hardware, geographical diversity, and different administrative domains that can be used by different users. This can be leveraged for other networking domains such as social networking and/or the Internet. The developed interaction models can also be used with other distributed systems. Different knowledge transfer workshops and competitions for students and researchers throughout Egypt will be hosted for familiarizing the participants about the developed testbed, advanced networking technologies, and the teaching capabilities of the testbed. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in all aspects of the project, spreading the research culture among the new generations. We also plan to incorporate the developed ideas in our graduate courses and disseminate the research results through international publication in conferences and journals and discussions with experts from all over the world.

• Prof. Mustafa ElNainay, Alexandria University, Egypt
• Prof. Moustafa Youssef, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Egypt

• Omar Salah, Alexandria University
• Mahmoud Mahdi, Zagazig University
• Abdelhamid Rabia, EJUST

• Yaser El-Nakieb, VT-MENA
• Arsany Hany, Alexandria University (currently with EPFL, Switzerland)
• Michael Azmy, Alexandria University (currently with Waterloo, Canada)
• Rizanne Mamdouh, Alexandria University/EJUST

• Prof. Karim Seddik, American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt
• Prof. Amr El-Sherif, Alexandria University, Egypt
• Prof. Mohamed AbdelRaheem,, (IoT Testbed) Assiut University, Egypt

• Mohamed Gamal, Alexandria University
• Camellia Saeed, Alexandria University
• Fouad Ismail, Alexandria University
• Kareem Metwaly, Alexandria University
• Mohamed Jad, Nile University
• Ali Hussein, Assiut University
• Mahmoud Abdelhafeez, Assiut University

• Samer Hanna, Alexandria University (currently with UCLA, USA)
• Mahmoud Alaa, Alexandria University (currently with AUC, Egypt)
• Mariam Nabil, Alexandria University (currently with AUC, Egypt)
• Alaa Darwish, Alexandria University
• Anwar ElRabie, Alexandria University

This project is funded by the National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA)