Open-source 5G RAN platforms finally get a head-to-head test on real workloads
Open-Source 5G Ran Platforms: A Dual Perspective on Performance and Capabilities
OpenAirInterface and srsRAN are the two open-source 5G RAN platforms most used for research, prototyping, and cheap private networks, yet prior evaluations rarely compare them across different SDRs, configurations, applications, and real user equipment. This paper closes that gap: a qualitative look at supported features and deployment flexibility, plus quantitative tests of radio resource control setup, theoretical data-rate compliance, and latency-sensitive workloads — video on demand, live streaming, and cloud gaming.
There is a lack of evaluations considering different Software-Defined Radios (SDRs), RAN configurations, user applications, and numbers of real UEs.
- armcat
I spent 10 years working with radio access networks (RAN), first in WCDMA (3G) then LTE (4G), then 5G. Our systems were also software defined radio (SDR), but, and this is crucial (and the paper points to this), the SDR as "malleable" as it is, is still highly dependent on the underlying hardware to achieve good performance.
Also, we spent huge amount of time making sure uplink performance is top-notch, as is the general stability and determinism, i.e. jitter and tail latency. In the paper they show that OAI is quite unstable, and they only achieve 5-49% of theoretical uplink capacity.
Also note this is a tiny setup, single server, four simultaneous UEs (phones). The systems I worked with handled 20 000 phones per second, with quality guarantees, in environments like central Tokyo and midtown Manhattan.
So great for independent research, but unfortunately, still very much bound to small end research.
- martijnvds
Note that this is about RAN (Radio Access Network) platforms, not the past tense of the verb "to run".