FikoRE: 5G and Beyond RAN Emulator for Application Level Experimentation and Prototyping

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Abstract
Novel and cutting-edge use cases have arisen since the first deployments of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications. We can already find multiple 5G simulators and emulators in the state-of-the-art which allow engineers and researchers to thoroughly study and test the network. However, the 5G ecosystem is not only limited to the network itself, a fast development of 5G-specific use cases can considerably accelerate the development of telecommunication technologies. We present FikoRE, our open-source real-time Radio Access Networks (RAN) emulator designed for application-level experimentation and prototyping, which aims to boost the development of novel use cases, such as eXtended Reality (XR) and the recently announced Metaverse. Its modularity and straightforward structure allow multidisciplinary users to rapidly utilize or even modify it to test their own applications. Besides, our thoughtful simplifications and assumptions allow to handle actual IP traffic above 1 Gb/s from multiple sources in real time, all while simulating hundreds of virtual User Equipments (UEs), outperforming other relevant cutting-edge RAN emulators. We thoroughly describe these modeling assumptions that allow high scalability and performance while preserving the overall accuracy. The high IP traffic throughput and multi-user capabilities allow FikoRE to be used in realistic advanced scenarios as XR offloading or multi-user XR. Finally, we present a set of validation results showing the emulation capabilities and modeling accuracy of the 5G full stack.