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Fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication systems are currently implemented worldwide. Moreover, the diversity between different deployments is growing, from operator-deployed macro networks to local private networks. The 5G system is very flexible with a large number of parameters and configurations impacting platform performance. With the availability of private spectrum and open-source software, there is an increasing possibility to get insight into what performance can be achieved in different dimensions, and how it depends on the configuration of various parameters, through experiments and testing. This paper presents a detailed account of a 5G Standalone (SA) platform based on the open5GS and srsRAN software suites installed on a general-purpose workstation. The performance of the platform is measured and compared to theoretical results and information from the 3GPP standardisation documentation. While some aspects of the performance are close to the theoretical expectations, others are further away. The software-defined radio (SDR) platform and the lack of hardware acceleration are probably the main limiting factors on coverage, uplink throughput and latency. The paper goes through several radio parameters and their impact on performance and discusses the performance implications and limitations of the experimental platform to share the lessons learned.

Radio Access Network (RAN) virtualization stands as a pivotal concept in the realm of 5G networks and beyond. It emerges as a viable solution not only to address energy cost concerns but also to optimize material and radio resource management. Despite numerous deployment trials worldwide, a comprehensive realization of Virtual RAN (V-RAN) remains elusive. Current platforms tackle various aspects of V-RAN but encounter numerous limitations. In this paper, we conduct a survey on the progress of RAN virtualization to date and discuss the persisting barriers to its full realization in future mobile radio networks. Initially, we revisit the fundamentals of virtualization and its evolution over recent decades, elucidating the distinctions between Cloud RAN (C-RAN), V-RAN, and Open RAN concepts. Subsequently, we offer an in-depth tutorial on the implementation procedures of V-RAN as per different vendors. Lastly, we shed light on persisting issues within vendor platforms and demonstrate, via simulations, the constraints on their performance concerning supported Base Band Units (BBUs) and devices, as well as coordination among various entities.

With developments in OpenRAN and software-defined radio (SDR), the mobile networking implementations for radio and security control are becoming increasingly software-based. We design and build a lightweight and distributed software assurance scheme, which ensures that a wireless user holds the correct software (version/code) for their wireless networking implementations. Our scheme is distributed (to support the distributed and ad hoc networking that does not utilize the networking-backend infrastructure), lightweight (to support the resource-constrained device operations), modular (to support compatibility with the existing mobile networking protocols), and supports broadcasting (as mobile and wireless networking has broadcasting applications). Our scheme is distinct from the remote code attestation in trusted computing, which requires hardwarebased security and real-time challenge-and-response communications with a centralized trusted server, thus making its deployment prohibitive in the distributed and broadcasting-based mobile networking environments. We design our scheme to be prover-specific and incorporate the Merkle tree for the verification efficiency to make it appropriate for a wireless-broadcasting medium with multiple receivers. In addition to the theoretical design and analysis, we implement our scheme to assure srsRAN (a popular open-source software for cellular technology, including 4G and 5G) and provide a concrete implementation and application instance to highlight our scheme's modularity, backward compatibility to the existing 4G/5G standardized protocol, and broadcasting support. Our scheme implementation incorporates delivering the proof in the srsRAN-implemented 4G/5G cellular handshake and connection establishment in radio resource control (RRC). We conduct experiments using SDR and various processors to demonstrate the lightweight design and its appropriateness for wireless networking applications. Our results show that the number of hash computations for the proof verification grows logarithmically with the number of software code files being assured and that the verification takes three orders of magnitude less time than the proof generation, while the proof generation overhead itself is negligible compared to the software update period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]