The next generation of mobile networks are embracing disaggregation, reflected by the industry trend towards Open RAN. Private 5G networks are viewed as particularly suitable contenders for adopting Open RAN, owing to their setting, high degree of control, and opportunity for innovation. Motivated by this, we have recently deployed the first of its kind campus-wide, O-RAN-compliant private 5G testbed across the central campus of the University of Edinburgh. We first present the rationale behind our testbed along with an overview of its make-up. Then, we outline our plan to showcase the coverage, flexibility, and the operational view of the testbed from both network side and user perspectives.

In the ongoing evolution of mobile networks, a key emerging focus is on "openness": disaggregation to enable multiple vendors. The obvious example of this is OpenRAN, a movement to open the traditionally-single-vendor RAN, to multiple vendors. However, despite the clear benefits that this approach has brought to the RAN, there has been little interest in applying this philosophy to other parts of the mobile network such as the mobile core. We argue that applying the philosophy of openness to the mobile core will result in significant ecosystem improvements to both mobile network operators and governments. In addition, we identify the key challenges for an "open core", formulate a set of criteria for evaluating openness of core designs, and assess current alternatives with respect those criteria.

The emerging nature of low-earth-orbiting satellite constellations has brought forth an era of global connectivity. Star-link has the potential to offer a truly global, high-performant service. An obvious question arising from this is whether Starlink can replace existing terrestrial services. In this work we describe the key findings from a detailed study of the performance of Starlink, investigating both its potential and shortcomings to act as a "global ISP".

Leveraging the public cloud for the Core Network (CN) remains uncommon amongst mobile network operators despite the economical and operational benefits. In this paper, we present a holistic feasibility analysis for various methods to deploy a cloud-native CN to AWS. Our findings confirm the economical and technical feasibility, and present a suitable deployment method for further adoption of the public cloud.

The Starlink network from SpaceX stands out as the only commercial LEO network with over 2M+ customers and more than 4000 operational satellites. In this paper, we conduct a first-of-its-kind extensive multi-faceted analysis of Starlink performance leveraging several measurement sources. First, based on 19.2M crowdsourced M-Lab speed tests from 34 countries since 2021, we analyze Starlink global performance relative to terrestrial cellular networks. Second, we examine Starlink's ability to support real-time latency and bandwidth-critical applications by analyzing the performance of (i) Zoom conferencing, and (ii) Luna cloud gaming, comparing it to 5G and fiber. Third, we perform measurements from Starlink-enabled RIPE Atlas probes to shed light on the last-mile access and other factors affecting its performance.Finally, we conduct controlled experiments from Starlink dishes in two countries and analyze the impact of globally synchronized "15-second reconfiguration intervals'' of the satellite links that cause substantial latency and throughput variations. Our unique analysis paints the most comprehensive picture of Starlink's global and last-mile performance to date.

Given the central role mobile core plays in supporting mobile network operations, the efficiency, cost-effective dynamic scalability and resilience of the core control plane are paramount. Achieving these goals, however, presents two main challenges: (i) decoupling core network state from processing; (ii) decoupling control plane processing in the core from its interface to the radio access network (RAN). To overcome them, we present CoreKube, a novel message focused and cloud-native mobile core system design, which features truly stateless workers (processing units) that interface with a common database (to hold the core network state) and with the RAN through a frontend. The fully stateless and generic nature of the workers to process any control plane message enables efficient message handling. Orchestration of containerized CoreKube components using Kubernetes, allows leveraging the latter's autoscaling and self-healing properties. We develop 4G and 5G standard-compliant CoreKube implementations, exploiting the agile development methodology enabled by CoreKube's message focused design. Results from our extensive experimental evaluations over the Powder platform relative to prior art show that CoreKube efficiently processes control plane messages, scales dynamically while using minimal compute resources and recovers seamlessly from failures.

Given the central role that the mobile core plays in supporting mobile network operations, the efficiency, cost-effective dynamic scalability and resilience of the core control plane are paramount. Achieving these goals, however, presents two main challenges: (i) decoupling core network state from processing; (ii) decoupling control plane processing in the core from its interface to the radio access network (RAN). To address these challenges, our proposed solution, CoreKube, is based on a novel message-focused and cloud-native design with truly stateless workers that interface with a common database (to hold the core network state) and with the RAN through a frontend in a standard compliant manner. The fully stateless and generic nature of the workers to process any control plane message enables efficient message handling. Orchestration of containerized CoreKube components using Kubernetes allows leveraging the latter's autoscaling and self-healing properties. This demo highlights three key features of CoreKube: dynamic scaling of core in the face of varying control plane traffic while maintaining low user-perceived latency, resilience to failures, and the ability to seamlessly interface with standard-compliant RAN and commodity hardware.