This section covers the status and roadmaps for development of the OpenAirInterface emulator, in particular related to the emulator mechanism, topology server and PHY abstraction modules.
Platform Description and Usage
OpenAirInterface emulation platform is a next-generation framework for real-time wireless 4G systems and networking experimentation applicable to evolving cellular technologies (LTE/LTE-Advanced) and rapidly-deployable mesh/ad-hoc networks. The Objective of this platform is to fill the gap between the simulation and real experimentation by providing the baselines for protocol validation, performance evaluation and pre-deployment system test.
The following figures show the architecture of the platform itself. The right handside figure illustrates the main building blocks of the emulator, while the left handside figure shows how the nodes can be virtualized across one or several machines and interacts with the external networks. A preliminary example of scenario definition can be found below in the attachment (xml file).
The emulation is based on a full real protocol stack implementation (i.e. not modelled)
- Network device (NAS)
- MAC/RLC/PDCP/RRC and IP
- PHY procedures
- Abstraction of physical channels, MODEM is abstracted along with propagation
Emulation platform supports the follwing variations:
Modes
- Debug Mode: Access stratum running in user space with no IP driver
- Soft Realtime mode: Access stratum running in user space and IP driver running in kernel
- Hard Realtime Mode : Access stratum running in RTAI kernel space and IP driver in kernel
Types
- One instance / machine: IP multicast through Ethernet (possibily through other meidiums)
- Several instances / machine: Direct memory transfer (for real-time behaviour with RTAI) with virtualization of protocol stacks : Shared memory
Features
- allows to emulate a medium-to-large scale networks on one or more machines (subject to the capacity of the target machine)
- provides the same conditions that are expected to occur in real-world wireless systems for the network protocols and application
- accepts real channel measurements or can be based on synthesized channel model
- allows end-to-end IPv4/IPv6 packet transition with QoS support, i.e. any standard application/traffic generator can be attached to any node in the network
- Possibility to interconnect the emulated networks to live networks or to additional emulated network (on-going)
Roadmap
Return to OpenAirRoadmaps
-- @navid.nikaein - 03 Feb 2011
