Experience Building a Prototype 5G Testbed

Abstract

While experimental work in the context of 5G has gained significant traction over the past few years, the focus has mainly been on testing the features and capabilities of novel designs and architectures using very simple testbed setups. However, with the emergence of network slicing as a key feature of 5G, creating larger scale infrastructures capable of supporting virtualized end-to-end mobile network services is of paramount importance for experimentation. In this work, we describe our experience in building such a prototype cross-domain testbed targeting 5G use cases, by enabling multi-tenancy through the virtualization of the underlying infrastructure. The capabilities of the testbed are demonstrated through the use case of neutral-host indoor small-cell deployments, followed by a discussion on the challenges we faced while building the testbed, which open up new research opportunities in this space. CCS CONCEPTS• Networks → Wireless access points, base stations and infrastructure; Network experimentation; Mobile networks;

Small‐Scale 5G Testbeds for Network Slicing Deployment: A Systematic Review

“…4.5. Orion [45,46]. The proposed architecture of the Orion testbed (Figure 8) enables dynamic RAN slicing.…”

“…(i) The first category comprises those testbeds that partially achieve some of the primary or secondary attributes of the design criteria for network slicing testbeds. In this regard, the testbeds in [38,40,45,46,50,55,56,58,[60][61][62][68][69][70][71] present network slicing in a particular network domain, and they do not realize a complete E2E network slicing. Reference [56] applies network slicing within multiple-VIMs (DCs); however, this implementation is limited to one network domain, and it does not present E2E network slicing, which crosses all network domains (RAN, TN, and CN).…”

“…To partially address this problem, different types of monitoring capabilities are integrated in some of the elaborated testbeds. The testbeds in which OSM acts as an orchestrator in their architectures, such as [40,45,46,59,62,64,70], usually employ the interaction of the system monitoring module (MON) with a monitoring toolkit such as Prometheus [73] for collection of VNFs' metrics and then utilize Grafana [74] (ii) Cross-location testbeds. Launching testbeds over separate areas impacts the service performance because of delay, jitter, and packet loss.…”

Iris: Deep Reinforcement Learning Driven Shared Spectrum Access Architecture for Indoor Neutral-Host Small Cells

“…Edge Cloud Deployment. To realize the Iris system design, we leveraged the OpenStack edge cloud deployment of the University of Edinburgh presented in [77], which is composed of 5 For the representation of the state and action space, we employed the OpenAI Gym [79] toolkit.…”

Satellite Integration into 5G: Accent on First Over-The-Air Tests of an Edge Node Concept with Integrated Satellite Backhaul

“…In contrast to the previous mobile network developments, an increasing use of testbeds implementations for experimenting and evaluating new ideas has been extended in 2018 [14,15]. Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) and the application of software based network functions make this kind of testbeds a reality for the academics, innovative research center and new partners to verify novel approaches without relying only on simulations [16]. These testbeds are large projects that have started with 4G architectures and are moving towards 5G architectures based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Releases.…”