Building a Low-cost Cloud Native 5G Network Slicing Experimental Testbed: Open-Source Solutions, Lessons Learned and Future Directions

Research on network slicing has gained some ground since its introduction to 5G networking. Network slicing has evolved from ideas, concepts, and simulations to real-world implementations. With this advancement, the realization and experimentation of network slicing remain a challenge due to the complexity involved. Research and experimentation testbeds have been built to explore and advance network slicing. However, most are quite expensive to set up or complicated for the novice researcher exploring 5G network slicing. In this work, we present a comprehensive and repeatable methodology that can be used to realize network slicing. Our approach focuses on building a low-cost, experimental cloud-native testbed using open-source solutions. The testbed leverages containerization and orchestration platforms to deploy the core network. We demonstrate end-to-end network slicing by extending the Open Air Interface’s reference setup with custom Helm charts. We validate the process of the user equipment requesting a slice on the network, to admission and management of the slice using slice-specific identifiers like Slice Service Type and Slice Differentiator. We highlight the lessons learned when automating this testbed setup to ensure the testbed is repeatable, consistent and proper resource isolation is achieved per slice as envisioned in network slicing. This work serves as a practical guide for researchers to experiment with and explore network slicing using readily available off-the-shelf hardware.