Emulation of LTE/5G Over a Lightweight Open-Platform: Re-configuration Delay Analysis
N. Kotopulis Ostinelli, Sisay Tadesse Arzo, Fabrizio Granelli, Michael Devetsikiotis · 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) · 2021
Network softwarization, containerization, and cloudification in a distributed and centralized environment are the current tread in 5G, Beyond 5G, and 6G. In that sense, significant activities are going on in the research community to softwarize the network functions deploying them in a cloud-native environment. Cloud-native architecture is an approach for network function and service to be built specifically to deployed in the cloud. In this paper, we emulated Long LTE/LTE-A/5G in lightweight containers. We have evaluated the feasibility of using very lightweight environments such as k3s. We show the possibility of emulating a simple 4G/5G scenario without requiring a full Kubernetes infrastructure. The final results are based on available open projects, used as inspiration and as a starting point to modify deployment techniques and configurations. We have also explored scalability, orchestration, automation, and reliability of the deployments. Finally, we measured and tested the performance. The performance evaluation shows the potential application of the open platform-based emulations and deployment in 5G and beyond.