  To address the rural broadband challenge and to leverage the unique
opportunities that rural regions provide for piloting advanced wireless
applications, we design and implement the ARA wireless living lab for research
and innovation in rural wireless systems and their applications in precision
agriculture, community services, and so on. ARA focuses on the unique
community, application, and economic context of rural regions, and it features
the first-of-its-kind, real-world deployment of long-distance, high-capacity
wireless x-haul and access platforms across a rural area of diameter over 30
km. With both software-defined radios and programmable COTS systems and through
effective orchestration of these wireless resources with fiber as well as
compute resources embedded end-to-end across user equipment, base stations,
edge, and cloud, ARA offers programmability, performance, robustness, and
heterogeneity at the same time, thus enabling rural-focused co-evolution of
wireless and applications while helping advance the frontiers of wireless
systems in domains such as O-RAN, NextG, and agriculture applications. Here we
present the design principles and implementation strategies of ARA,
characterize its performance and heterogeneity, and highlight example wireless
and application experiments uniquely enabled by ARA.
