A Survey on Open-Source-Defined Wireless Networks: Framework, Key Technology, and Implementation

TL;DR

This survey reviews open-source wireless networks, covering frameworks, key technologies, and implementations, highlighting challenges, security issues, and future research directions in the evolving 5G and 6G landscape.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of open-source wireless network frameworks, technologies, and implementations, including lessons learned and future research challenges.

Findings

Classification of frameworks into black-box, grey-box, and white-box

Analysis of open-source core network and radio access network efforts

Identification of security threats and open research issues

Abstract

The realization of open-source-defined wireless networks in the telecommunication domain is accomplished through the fifth-generation network (5G). In contrast to its predecessors (3G and 4G), the 5G network can support a wide variety of heterogeneous use cases with challenging requirements from both the Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT). The future sixth-generation (6G) network will not only extend 5G capabilities but also innovate new functionalities to address emerging academic and engineering challenges. The research community has identified these challenges could be overcome by open-source-defined wireless networks, which is based on open-source software and hardware. In this survey, we present an overview of different aspects of open-source-defined wireless networks, comprising motivation, frameworks, key technologies, and implementation. We start by introducing the motivation and explore several frameworks with classification into three different categories: black-box, grey-box, and white-box. We review research efforts related to open-source-defined Core Network (CN), Radio Access Network (RAN), Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), the capabilities of security threats, open-source hardware, and various implementations, including testbeds. The last but most important in this survey, lessons learned, future research direction, open research issues, pitfalls, and limitations of existing surveys on open-source wireless networks are included to motivate and encourage future research.