Guest Editorial: Experimentation in Large-Scale Wireless Community Testbeds
İsmail Güvenç, Kaushik Chowdhury, Serge Fdida, Masafumi Masuda · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2025
The gap between fundamental research in wireless technologies and their real-world testing has been growing rapidly. As the wireless research community continually moves on to new research domains in pursuit of the “next big idea,” many foundational discoveries and research findings from universities and national labs end up not getting tested in the field. Validating research outcomes via theoretical analysis and computer simulations alone carries the risk of using models that fall short of capturing real-world circumstances, including propagation conditions, waveforms, protocol aspects, and hardware impairments. These shortcomings in such evaluation methodologies may result in misleading conclusions about the real-world performance of new concepts and technologies. Even when experiments are conducted, they may often be carried out with a narrow geographical and/or technical scope that is not representative of their typical deployment and operational environments, nor can they be reproduced. On the other hand, many corporations are often focused on product development and short-term research agendas with an immediate impact on revenue, and market pressures may not always permit investing in fundamental research studies and their real-world testing.