Introduction
The 5G testbed project is a Department of Telecommunications (DoT) funded multi-institute effort that is aimed at developing the 5G research and startup ecosystem in India. The goal of the testbed is to develop all components of a basic 5G system from the ground up in a production-grade standards-compliant manner, and open up these components to researchers and startups in India for their use in R&D efforts.
The 5G testbed team in IIT Bombay is part of the team that is has built several components of the 5G core. The 5G core connects the user equipment (UE) and the radio access network (RAN) to the wired Internet and other networks.
Current status
The 5G testbed project has completed at IIT Bombay, and our 5G core is available for licensing for use in research testbeds and commercial products. Please contact Mythili Vutukuru (mythili@cse.iitb.ac.in) for further details.- We have integrated the 5G core developed at IIT Bombay with the end-to-end 5G testbed hosted at IIT Madras.
- We were part of the first 5G call demonstration on a completely indigenous 5G stack in May 2022, to Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of telecommunications, Government of India.
- We are licensing binaries and source code to Indian vendors for commercialization.
Design Principles of 5G Core
The architecture of the 5G core, and its main components, are shown below.
Development of the 5G core at IIT Bombay has been done in line with the state-of-the-art design principles being followed in the industry.
- All components of the 5G core are built as scalable, fault tolerant, software network functions, in accordance with the principle of Network Function Virtualization (NFV).
- The components of the 5G core follow a cloud-native design, and can be run on VMs or containers in a public or private cloud, on commodity hardware.
- The 5G core components achieve high performance on par with industry-grade products. The control plane components support few hundreds of control plane procedures per CPU core, with performance scaling with number of cores. The data plane components are capable of forwarding traffic at few tens of Gbps.
Procedures supported
The following is a list of the main procedures currently supported in our 5G core.- User registration (initial, mobility, periodic) and deregistration
- Session management procedures (setup, release, modification)
- Active/idle mode transitions (AN release, service request, paging)
- GTP-based data forwarding
- Basic support for mobility, slicing, QoS, MEC, and other features