Toward Experimentation-as-a-Service in 5G/6G: The Plaza6G Prototype for AI-Assisted Trials

TL;DR

Plaza6G is an innovative Experiment-as-a-Service platform that unifies cloud and next-generation wireless infrastructure, enabling easy, AI-assisted wireless experimentation with minimal expertise and automated setup.

Contribution

This work introduces Plaza6G, the first operational platform integrating diverse wireless and cloud resources with AI-assisted experiment design and automation.

Findings

Automated CI/CD integration with sub-ten-minute setup

Interactive over-the-air testing in controlled environments

Reproducible experiment descriptors for wireless trials

Abstract

This paper presents Plaza6G, the first operational Experiment-as-a-Service (ExaS) platform unifying cloud resources with next-generation wireless infrastructure. Developed at CTTC in Barcelona, Plaza6G integrates GPU-accelerated compute clusters, multiple 5G cores, both open-source (e.g., Free5GC) and commercial (e.g., Cumucore), programmable RANs, and physical or emulated user equipment under unified orchestration. In Plaza6G, the experiment design requires minimal expertise as it is expressed in natural language via a web portal or a REST API. The web portal and REST API are enhanced with a Large Language Model (LLM)-based assistant, which employs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for up-to-date experiment knowledge and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for continuous domain fine-tuning. Over-the-air (OTA) trials leverage a four-chamber anechoic facility and a dual-site outdoor 5G network operating in sub-6~GHz and mmWave bands. Demonstrations include automated CI/CD integration with sub-ten-minute setup and interactive OTA testing under programmable propagation conditions. Machine-readable experiment descriptors ensure reproducibility, while future work targets policy-aware orchestration, safety validation, and federated testbed integration toward open, reproducible wireless experimentation.