Nervion: a cloud native RAN emulator for core network evaluations

Abstract

With the mobile networks evolving towards a software-based architecture with 5G, the research community has proposed several alternative core designs to address the issues recognized with the 4G core network architecture. It is notable, however, that these proposals are evaluated in bespoke ways which do not allow evaluate other proposals or even standard-compliant core networks, presenting several limitations in terms of the number of devices and the network load patterns that can be generated. To this end, we present Nervion, a cloud-native RAN emulator for scalable and flexible core network evaluations. Nervion leverages a compute cluster via containerization to emulate a large number of standard-compliant UEs and eNBs/gNBs generating workloads along both the control- and data-plane with a high degree of customization. This demo highlights the features of Nervion via the evaluation of a 5G core network and serves as a guide on how to use the public profile of Nervion on the Powder platform.