Open, Programmable, and Virtualized 5G Networks: State-of-the-Art and the Road Ahead

Abstract

Fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will serve a wide variety of heterogeneous use cases, including mobile broadband users, ultra-low latency services and massively dense connectivity scenarios. The resulting diverse communication requirements will demand networking with unprecedented flexibility, not currently provided by the monolithic black-box approach of 4G cellular networks. The research community and an increasing number of standardization bodies and industry coalitions have recognized softwarization, virtualization, and disaggregation of networking functionalities as the key enablers of the needed shift to flexibility. Particularly, software-defined cellular networks are heralded as the prime technology to satisfy the new application-driven traffic requirements and to support the highly time-varying topology and interference dynamics, because of their openness through well-defined interfaces, and programmability, for swift and responsive network optimization. Leading the technological innovation in this direction, several 5G software-based projects and alliances have embraced the open source approach, making new libraries and frameworks available to the wireless community. This race to open source softwarization, however, has led to a deluge of solutions whose interoperability and interactions are often unclear. This article provides the first cohesive and exhaustive compendium of recent open source software and frameworks for 5G cellular networks, with a full stack and end-to-end perspective. We detail their capabilities and functionalities focusing on how their constituting elements fit the 5G ecosystem, and unravel the interactions among the surveyed solutions. Finally, we review hardware and testbeds on which these frameworks can run, and discuss the limitations of the state-of-the-art, as well as feasible directions toward fully open source, programmable 5G networks.

References in corpus (17)

• Millimeter Wave Cellular Wireless Networks: Potentials and Challenges
• 5G network slicing using SDN and NFV- A survey of taxonomy, architectures and future challenges
• A Tutorial on Beam Management for 3GPP NR at mmWave Frequencies
• End-to-End Simulation of 5G mmWave Networks
• The Engineering of Software-Defined Quantum Key Distribution Networks
• Enhanced Machine Learning Techniques for Early HARQ Feedback Prediction in 5G
• Machine Learning at the Edge: A Data-Driven Architecture with Applications to 5G Cellular Networks
• Impact of Processing-Resource Sharing on the Placement of Chained Virtual Network Functions
• Sl-EDGE: Network Slicing at the Edge
• CellOS: Zero-touch Softwarized Open Cellular Networks
• srsLTE: An Open-Source Platform for LTE Evolution and Experimentation
• Open-source RANs in practice: an over-the-air deployment for 5G MEC
• On the Challenges and KPIs for Benchmarking Open-Source NFV MANO Systems: OSM vs ONAP
• OWL: a Reliable Online Watcher for LTE Control Channel Measurements
• Implementing NB-IoT in Software - Experiences Using the srsLTE Library
• Mobile Traffic Classification through Physical Channel Fingerprinting: a Deep Learning Approach
• Learning-Assisted Secure End-to-End Network Slicing for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cited by in corpus (32)

• Revolutionizing Future Connectivity: A Contemporary Survey on AI-empowered Satellite-based Non-Terrestrial Networks in 6G
• Empowering the 6G Cellular Architecture with Open RAN
• A Survey on Open Radio Access Networks: Challenges, Research Directions, and Open Source Approaches
• OpenRAN Gym: AI/ML Development, Data Collection, and Testing for O-RAN on PAWR Platforms
• Rearchitecting Kubernetes for the Edge
• SLICES, a scientific instrument for the networking community
• CellOS: Zero-touch Softwarized Open Cellular Networks
• Artificial Intelligence in Open Radio Access Network
• A Comprehensive Tutorial and Survey of O-RAN: Exploring Slicing-aware Architecture, Deployment Options, Use Cases, and Challenges
• Towards End-to-End Application Slicing in Multi-access Edge Computing systems: Architecture Discussion and Proof-of-Concept
• SEM-O-RAN: Semantic and Flexible O-RAN Slicing for NextG Edge-Assisted Mobile Systems
• Deep Reinforcement Learning for Orchestrating Cost-Aware Reconfigurations of vRANs
• Wild Networks: Exposure of 5G Network Infrastructures to Adversarial Examples
• Open-Source 5G Core Platforms: A Low-Cost Solution and Performance Evaluation
• X5G: An Open, Programmable, Multi-vendor, End-to-end, Private 5G O-RAN Testbed with NVIDIA ARC and OpenAirInterface
• SteaLTE: Private 5G Cellular Connectivity as a Service with Full-stack Wireless Steganography
• Driving Innovation in 6G Wireless Technologies: The OpenAirInterface Approach
• Intelligence and Learning in O-RAN for Data-driven NextG Cellular Networks
• Scheduling Out-of-Coverage Vehicular Communications Using Reinforcement Learning
• Smart Jamming Attack and Mitigation on Deep Transfer Reinforcement Learning Enabled Resource Allocation for Network Slicing
• Streaming from the Air: Enabling Drone-sourced Video Streaming Applications on 5G Open-RAN Architectures
• Multi Agent Team Learning in Disaggregated Virtualized Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN)
• RLOps: Development Life-cycle of Reinforcement Learning Aided Open RAN
• Spectrum Sensing with Deep Clustering: Label-Free Radio Access Technology Recognition
• 4C: A Computation, Communication, and Control Co-Design Framework for CAVs
• Open and Programmable 5G Network-in-a-Box: Technology Demonstration and Evaluation Results
• Design and Implementation of Time-Sensitive Wireless IoT Networks on Software-Defined Radio
• Towards Achieving Energy Efficiency and Service Availability in O-RAN via Formal Verification
• Toward Next Generation Open Radio Access Network--What O-RAN Can and Cannot Do!
• CN2F: A Cloud-Native Cellular Network Framework
• Resource Management for 5G NR Integrated Access and Backhaul: a Semi-centralized Approach
• Remote and Rural Connectivity: Infrastructure and Resource Sharing Principles