About the WARP Project
The Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP) is a scalable and extensible programmable wireless platform, built from the ground up to prototype advanced wireless networks. WARP combines high-performance programmable hardware with an open-source repository of reference designs and support materials.
The WARP Project was founded in 2006 by Prof. Ashu Sabharwal at Rice University. The project was originally funded by the National Science Foundation with ongoing support from Xilinx.
In the first 5 years of the project the Rice WARP team:
- Designed the first two generations of WARP hardware
- Created the WARPLab and OFDM Reference Designs
- Conducted 11 WARP Workshops at Rice and universities around the world
- Used WARP for many cutting-edge research projects, including beamforming, cooperative PHY and MAC design and full-duplex wireless (see full list)
The project has since grown into a self-sustaining open-source effort with users around the world. Mango Communications spun off from the Rice WARP Project in 2008 with the initial goal of manufacturing and distributing the Rice WARP hardware. In 2012 Mango released the entirely re-designed WARP v3 hardware. Today Mango engineers are the most active contributors to the WARP repository and forums, providing ongoing development and support of open-source WARP designs, including WARPLab 7 and the 802.11 Reference Design.
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Research Impact
WARP has been adopted by hundreds of researchers worldwide. The platform has been used for cutting-edge research on a wide of topics, including full-duplex wireless, cooperative communications, localization and multi-user MIMO. The pace of adoption continues to accelerate.
We have highlighted a number of projects enabled by WARP. If you have a project we should add to this list, please email us (info[at]warpproject.org).
Please visit the list of papers published by WARP users, and Google Scholar's list of papers citing WARP.
Education Impact
Many students learning digital communication never get to see a real wireless link in a lab. Many courses only address the theory of baseband processing or higher layer protocol design. WARP has proven an excellent means to fill this gap for undergraduate and graduate education labs. The open-source WARPLab and OFDM/CSMA Reference Designs are ideal starting points for introducing students to real-world physical layer processing and protocol development.
A number of universities have already adopted WARP for use in their courses, including:
- Rice University ELEC 433: Digital Communications Lab
- Southern Methodist University EE8391: Embedded Wireless Protocol Design Lab
- Drexel University ECET-512: Wireless Systems
More Information
To learn more about the project, please visit the WARP Repository or email the project developers at info[at]warpproject.org.
The First 3000+ Days of the WARP Open-Source Repository
This is a visualization of modifications made to the WARP open-source repository over its first 3070 days. The "tree" is the repository itself. The folder structure is represented by the white line branches. Connected to these branches are different files, represented by different color circles depending on the file type. Users of the WARP repository can be seen moving around the various files and modifying them. Significant events in WARP's timeline can are shown as titles in the corners of the video.
