Open-source RANs in practice: an over-the-air deployment for 5G MEC
This work addresses the problem of burdensome edge application deployment for developers and researchers by providing a practical, open-source alternative to proprietary 5G MEC systems.
The authors tackled the challenge of deploying edge applications on proprietary cellular networks by introducing an open-source RAN infrastructure with DevOps capabilities, achieving 7.5MB/s throughput and 21ms latency in over-the-air testing.
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 OSS based RAN on OTA commercial spectrum with DevOps capabilities. OSS allows software modifications and integrations of the system components, e.g., 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 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.