Overview

This appliance includes a pre-installed version of the UERANSIM 5G UE and RAN (gNodeB) simulator. This appliance can be used for creating a simulated 5G network. A complete scenario includes the deployment of a 5G core as described in the next sections. The appliance includes two major components:

• gNodeB - component which emulates cellular base station (gNodeB) in the RAN and performs communication with 5G Core components.
• UE emulator - software component which emulates 5G user equipment, i.e. cellular phone.

Architecture of the 5G network

The following diagram shows the architecture of the target scenario, it consists of the following components:

• The UERANSIM appliance that will simulate the gNodeB and UE elements
• A OneKE kubernetes cluster that will be used to simplify the deployment of the 5G core
• A 5G network core, in our case we'll be using Open5GS

In the next section we will describe how to manually deploy this architecture.

    ┌──────────────────┐                                                       
    │UERANSIM Appliance│                                                       
    │ ┌────┐   ┌─────┐ │                                                       
    │ │ UE │   │ gNB │ │                                                       
    │ └────┘   └─────┘ │                                                      
    └─────────┬────────┘                                                       
              │                                                                
              │ Public Network                                                 
              │                                                                
┌──  ──  ──  ─┼──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──┐     
              │                                  OnKE Kubernetes Cluster      
│  ┌──────────┴───────────┐                                              │     
   │ VNF - Virtual Router │                                                   
│  └──┬───────────────────┘                                              │    
      │                                                                     
│     │                                                                  │    
      │                                           Private Network             
│     └──| MetalLB IP pool |────────┬──────────────────────┬─────        │    
               │                    │                      │                  
│              │                    │                      │             │    
               │                    │                      │                  
│        ┌─────┴────┐      ┌────────┴────────┐      ┌──────┴─────────┐   │    
         │k8s Master│      │ k8s Worker Node │      │k8s Storage Node│        
│        └──────────┘      │ ┌────────────┐  │      │  ┌───────────┐ │   │     
                           │ │Open5Gs pods│  │      │  │MongodB PVC│ │        
│                          │ └────────────┘  │      │  └───────────┘ │   │       
                           └─────────────────┘      └────────────────┘             
└──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ──  ───   ──┘