Open-source RANs in Practice

Edge computing that leverages cloud resources to the proximity of user devices is seen as the future infrastructure for distributed applications. However, developing and deploying edge applications, that rely on cellular networks, is burdensome. Such network infrastructures are often based on proprietary components, each with unique programming abstractions and interfaces. To facilitate straightforward deployment of edge applications, we introduce open-source software (OSS) based radio access network (RAN) on over-the-air (OTA) commercial spectrum with Development Operations (DevOps) capabilities. OSS allows software modifications and integrations of the system components, e.g., Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and edge hosts running applications, required for new data pipelines and optimizations not addressed in standardization. Such an OSS infrastructure enables further research and prototyping of novel end-user applications in an environment familiar to software engineers without telecommunications background. We evaluated the presented infrastructure with end-to-end (E2E) OTA testing, resulting in 7.5MB/s throughput and latency of 21ms, which shows that the presented infrastructure provides low latency for edge applications.

Haavisto Juuso, Arif Muhammad, Lovén Lauri, Leppänen Teemu, Riekki Jukka

A1 Journal article – refereed

2019 European Conference on Networks and Communications, EuCNC 2019. 18-21 June 2019, Valencia, Spain

J. Haavisto, M. Arif, L. Lovén, T. Leppänen and J. Riekki, "Open-source RANs in Practice: an Over-The-Air Deployment for 5G MEC," 2019 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), Valencia, Spain, 2019, pp. 495-500. doi: 10.1109/EuCNC.2019.8801973

https://doi.org/10.1109/EuCNC.2019.8801973 http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi-fe2019082024777