Towards a Realistic 5G Infrastructure Emulator for Experimental Service Deployment and Performance Evaluation

The emerging Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks have been attracting enormous attention from various stakeholders around the world. In particular, in the research community, prototyping 5G infrastructures and deploying 5G services have gained gears recently towards realising market-oriented 5G trials. However, accessing to and programming on real-world 5G infrastructure is almost prohibitive for most 5G researchers especially in academia. Therefore, it is critical to build realistic yet cost-efficient 5G infrastructure emulators for 5G research labs to enable credible 5G research activities. This paper proposes such a 5G infrastructure emulator that is able to emulate a realistic 5G network in a lab setting based on a small number of commercial-off-the-shelf servers by leveraging virtualization and other technologies. Moreover, this emulator allows a service provider to automatically deploy 5G services from 'empty' machines through advanced automation. The emulation platform is described in details with the 5G infrastructure and service deployment procedure highlighted. Empirical results are presented to show the performance of the proposed emulator.