There has been a recent paradigm shift within the wireless communications academic community towards implementation-based algorithm validation. In the past, this task was left to industrial affiliates but in order to close the theory to implementation loop faster research groups are actively developing proof-of-concept demonstrations of their theoretical protocols. In this work we present the Wireless Open-Access Research Platform for Networks (WARPnet) that provides all the computational power and data resources needed to prototype novel physical and MAC layers for emerging technologies. The platform is built to be deployed enabling large-scale network-wide experiments. Scheduling experiments and gathering data can be accomplished with a central server connected to the nodes. We characterize the dedicated control channel built for remote control and statistics aggregation, present frameworks for data transfer and implement example applications that show the methodology for benchmarking distributed wireless experiments.