Performance Assessment of Open Software Platforms for 5G Prototyping

Given the urgency of standardizing the fifth generation (5G) mobile systems to meet the ever more stringent demands of new applications, the importance of field trials and experimentation cannot be overstated. Practical experimentation with cellular networks has been historically reserved exclusively to operators, primarily due to equipment costs and licensing constraints. The state of play is changing with the advent of open source cellular stacks based on increasingly more affordable software defined radio (SDR) systems. However, comprehensive understanding of the performance, limitations, and interoperability of these tools is lacking. In this article we fill this gap by assessing, by means of controlled experiments, the performance of today's most popular open software eNB solutions in combination with different commodity UE and an SDR alternative, over a range of practical settings. Although these cannot underpin complete 5G systems yet, their development is progressing rapidly, and researchers have employed them for 5G-specific applications including LTE unlicensed and network slicing. We further shed light on the perils of open tools and give configuration guidelines that can be used to deploy these solutions effectively. Our results quantify the throughput attainable with each stack, their resource consumption footprint, and their reliability and bootstrap times in view of automating experimentation. Lastly, we qualitatively evaluate the extensibility of the solutions considered.