5GFed

BASIC INFORMATION

Short name: 5GFed
Long name: Integration and testing of 5G NR OpenAirInterface in the Fed4FIRE+ federation

Company: Allbesmart LDA
Country: Portugal

Call: F4Fp-09 (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-09-M08

SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS

The practical experimentation with 3GPP networks has been historically reserved exclusively to network equipment vendors and telecommunication operators, primarily due to high equipment costs and licensing constraints. In recent years, the state of play has been changing with the advent of open-source 3GPP stacks based on increasingly more affordable Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems. In this context, OpenAirInterface (OAI) emerges as an open-source initiative that provides a reference implementation of 5G gNB, User Equipment (UE), and 5G core network (5GC), standard-compliant with 3GPP and that runs on general-purpose x86 computing platforms along with off-the-shelf SDR hardware platforms like the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP).

Allbesmart is an associated member of the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA), actively contributing to the continuous integration and delivery of the 5G NR OAI code. Allbesmart wants to leverage its OAI deep expertise to provide consultancy services on OAI implementations of 3GPP 5G NR protocol stack to accelerate 5G product development and innovations. In this context, the main objective of 5GFed is to deploy OAI 5G NR in two Fed4FIRE+ wireless testbeds (CityLab and IRIS), allowing us to test the replicability of 5G experiments and mature our OAI 5G consultancy service sufficiently to offer it to our commercial partners and to approach potential new customers for proof-of-concept testing and trials. The 5GFed experiment will take advantage of the added value of working with federated testbeds. The deployment of the 5G OAI stack in the Fed4FIRE+ infrastructure will enable the scientific community and company researchers in exploring end-to-end 5G experimentation for new application areas. Thanks to this experiment, Fed4FIRE+ will be able to provide a free-of-charge benchmark, end-to-end 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA) open-source implementation for 5G protocol testing, promoting 5G innovation.

MATERIALS