With its wide applicability across a variety of enterprise verticals, the private wireless (PW) industry is growing at a rapid pace. However, existing hierarchical cellular network architectures are sub-optimal for most PW use cases due to their high computational overhead, lack of compatibility with on-premises enterprise applications, and complex management structure. To that end, this paper espouses the notion of RAN-Core Convergence for the PW user plane as an alternative to the traditional RAN-Core hierarchy through the introduction of LEVEL, a new converged approach to cellular network design. With a specific emphasis on the user plane, key highlights include a unified system architecture and protocol stack design, new primitives for interacting with the cellular control plane, and a programmable approach to QoS management. The paper also includes a high-performance systems-level prototype of the LEVEL User Plane (LEVEL-UP), deployed on an over-the-air experimental testbed. The resulting performance evaluation showcases that LEVEL-UP seamlessly handles traffic in excess of$\mathrm{\rm{20}~Gbps}$, while achieving a$60\%$reduction in compute utilization and$30\%$reduction in energy consumption when compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Furthermore, latency benchmarks reveal a delay reduction of at least$70\%$. Finally, in typical high mobility environments, LEVEL-UP helps cut bufferbloat and reduces delays from seconds to milliseconds, thereby serving as an ideal companion for the burgeoning PW industry.

In recent years, the radio access network (RAN) domain has seen significant changes with increased virtualization and softwarization, driven by the Open RAN (O-RAN) movement. However, the fundamental building block of the cellular network, i.e., the base station, remains unchanged and ill-equipped to handle this architectural evolution. In particular, there exists a general lack of programmability and composability along with a protocol stack that grapples with the intricacies of the 3GPP and O-RAN specifications. Recognizing the need for an “O-RAN-native” approach to base station design, this paper introduces HexRAN– a novel base station architecture characterized by key features relating to RAN disaggregation and composability, 3GPP and O-RAN protocol integration and programmability, robust controller interactions, and customizable RAN slicing. Furthermore, the paper also includes a concrete systems-level prototype and comprehensive experimental evaluation of HexRAN on an over-the-air testbed. The results demonstrate that HexRAN uses only 8% more computing resources compared to the baseline, while managing twice the user plane traffic, delivering control plane processing latency of under 120μs, and achieving 100% processing reliability. This underscores the scalability and performance advantages of the proposed architecture.

With the open radio access network (O-RAN) movement driving the evolution of cellular networks towards 6G, real time (RT) RAN control and assurance has emerged as the next frontier in RAN programmability, with in-base station (BS) machine learning (ML) at its core. However, scalability demands associated with production-grade networks necessitate the need for a robust, yet lightweight in-BS ML operations framework to support automated ML workflows. To that end, this paper introduces TinyRIC-ML, a novel lightweight and high-performance ML platform for RT operations within the RAN. Key highlights include a comprehensive system architecture design, a concrete systems-level implementation, and a preliminary over-the-air experimental evaluation to demonstrate the system's performance and feasibility.

The increasing complexity of cellular networks has resulted in dynamic network performance optimization (NPO) playing a critical role in streamlining network operations. While the success of NPO techniques primarily depends upon the quality and quantity of telemetry data available from the underlying network, up until now, third-party access to such data has been largely limited due to the prevalence of proprietary interfaces throughout the access network. However, the upcoming open radio access network (RAN) architecture is set to change this trend. While a significant first step, the open RAN architecture lacks a mechanism for the generation, collection, and exposure of RAN-level statistics in a programmable manner, thereby limiting the effectiveness of dynamic NPO. To that end, this paper introduces RANSight, a system for programmable telemetry within next-generation open RANs. Key highlights include the establishment of novel primitives for programmability within RAN telemetry, a detailed component-level description of the RANSight architecture, and the design and implementation of RANSight in support of a RAN slice monitoring use case. Furthermore, the paper also includes a comprehensive experimental evaluation on an over-the-air testbed which demonstrates that not only does RANSight fulfill its stated objectives of programmable telemetry, it also significantly improves system scalability by providing a staggering 65% reduction in compute resource utilization compared to systems without RANSight.

The increasing popularity of programmable wireless networks has led to efforts by both academia as well as industry to redesign access networks based on the disaggregated Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) concept. However, the absence of a development platform for prototyping O-RAN use cases and the perceived complexity of the O-RAN specification have led to a stagnation of systems research efforts in this domain with a disproportionate focus on monolithic RAN architectures. With a view to overcoming these challenges, this paper introduces the ProSLICE platform, a full-scale realization of the complete O-RAN specification based on purely open source components along with several enhancements and extensions for fine-grained network control and ease of use. Key contributions include a fully disaggregated O-RAN-compliant RAN, a custom O-RAN service model in support of network slicing, statistics and configuration applications for the O-RAN RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), and a comprehensive use case-based performance evaluation.

While Open RAN harbors the potential to revolutionize cellular access networks, the absence of an open platform for use case prototyping and a near-exclusive focus on 5G SA have tempered its commercial appeal. With a view to addressing these limitations, this paper introduces a disaggregated O-RAN platform with a novel multi-RAT RAN slicing framework across LTE, 5G NSA, and 5G SA. A preliminary performance evaluation showcases promising results addressing key features related to end-user service quality and use case-specific adaptability.

Future mobile networks (5G) would be much more flexible, dynamic and faster adaptable to match the evolved demand. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is investigated to take the advantage of information technology (IT) virtualization on telecom networks by separating network functions to be virtualized from underlying dedicated hardwares. Container-based micro-service is currently discussed as being lightweight virtualization approach enabling flexibility and scalability of future mobile networks. Virtualizing mobile network functions, the Serving Gateway (SGW) is analyzed as being the most sensible component, a bottleneck. The containerization seems to be the adequate approach to overcome this issue as it could enable rapid deployment by scaling SGW instances based on workload. In this paper, we discuss the cloudification of mobile network functions using containerization technology and 12 factors principles for enabling such cloudification. An implementation is made using Docker containerization while we employ Docker Swarm for cluster management and deployment. We also build an orchestration testbed for testing the scalability of SGW. This is realized by comparing the performances of two open-source orchestrators: Kubernetes and Mesos- Marathon. The proof of concepts shows clearly that a container-based approach is a viable option for achieving elasticity of future mobile networks.

The introduction of micro-services in cloud infrastructure provides modularity, flexibility and distributed software components. In telecom, the Network Function Virtualization enables running an application as a collection of smaller software components and micro-services that share an operating system (OS) or distributed across many computing servers in the cloud. In this paper, we present a micro-service platform to target the flexibility of telecom networks and the automation of its deployment. Using Docker orchestration, this demo paper shows the flexibility and the rapid deployment of a wireless network infrastructure.