eXP-RAN—An Emulator for Gaining Experience With Radio Access Networks, Edge Computing, and Slicing

Radio Access Networks (RAN), Edge Computing (EC), and Network Slicing are some of the critical components in 5G networks used to provide different transport services over the same infrastructure and to enable new features, e.g., low latency and context awareness. It is important to have tools for evaluating present and future applications over these components; however, there is a gap between theoretical work on resource allocation and its deployment in simulated, emulated, or real-world experiments. This paper addresses these issues through a new emulation software named eXP-RAN, which enables experimenting with network slicing in virtualized RAN nodes and EC scenarios. In this version, we have focused on the computing part of RANs. Experiments can be created manually or imported from an optimization model. We describe the software architecture and its advantages over traditional tools such as ns-3 and Mininet, as well as more recent tool targets to EC simulations such as EdgeCloudSim. We also illustrate how two use-cases, a virtual RAN (vRAN) / Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) orchestration and a network slicing for video service providers can be emulated and explored using eXP-RAN.