FikoRE: 5G and Beyond RAN Emulator for Application Level Experimentation and Prototyping

TL;DR

FikoRE is a modular, real-time RAN emulator designed for application-level testing and prototyping in 5G, enabling rapid development and validation of new telecommunication use cases.

Contribution

The paper introduces FikoRE, a novel, flexible, real-time RAN emulator tailored for application-level experimentation in 5G networks.

Findings

FikoRE effectively supports application testing with validated experiments.

The emulator's modular design facilitates easy customization.

FikoRE accelerates development of new 5G use cases.

Abstract

Novel and cutting-edge use cases have arisen since the first deployments of the fifth generation of telecommunication networks (5G). There are plenty of well-though optimally design 5G simulators and emulators which allow telecommunication technologies engineers and researchers to thoroughly study and test the network. However, the 5G ecosystem is not only limited to the network itself: a fast development of 5G-specific use cases can considerably accelerate the development of telecommunication technologies. We present FikoRE, our real-time Radio Access Networks (RAN) emulator carefully designed for application-level experimentation and prototyping. Its modularity and straightforward implementation allow multidisciplinary user to rapidly use or even modify it to test their own applications. In this article, we present FikoRE's architecture accompanied with relevant validation experiments and results.