Our AV Chair hosted at TU Berlin on April 17, 2024, the Open Source Mobile Network Technologies Conference (OSMNT24). It was a one day event organized in the free and open source software events style, with free registration, and presentations about the OS projects directly from the projects’ developers. The idea of the event came out of the work done by TUB/AV in the open6GHub project, where we do research on optimizations towards 6G and we study and understand the current status of open source and its eventual potential to influence the evolution towards 6G.
There was a very good opportunity to meet the developers of many projects active in the 4G/5G space:
- PySim – the toolkit for SIM cards programming (Germany)
- 5G-LENA NS3 – the NR simulator (Spain)
- OpenAirInterface RAN (France) – gNB implementation
- srsRAN (Germany/Spain) – gNB implementation
- free5GC (Taiwan) – 5G core implementation
- Kamailio (Germany) – at the core of IMS platform (P-CSCF, I-CSCF, S-CSCF, SMSC) for VoNR and SMSoNR services
- pyHSS (Australia) – component of IMS platform for VoNR services
- pfcpcore (Germany) – UPF implementation
- omnt (Germany / Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute) – toolkit for measurement data on mobile networks
There were presentations on testbeds and deployments of OS projects from Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, TU Berlin and small companies. Full schedule is available here:
Also demos of private 5G networks were showed:
- srsRAN demonstrated us high uplink traffic scenarios
- BISDN GmbH demonstrated their newly released implementation of the pfcpcore UPF
- TU Berlin AV together with Kamailio project demonstrated VoNR and SMSoNR over a private 5G SA network only with open source projects. This is the first available VoNR prototype in the world of open source and gained a lot of attention and of course many questions on how it works.
It was an event targeting to foster collaboration between the projects that implement various components of a 5G network, meet the developers and learn from each other. The participants had a very strong technical background and were very committed to show the best of their projects, were delighted to share their experiences and work together, brainstorm and innovate to find solutions for interfacing and integrations in end-to-end 5G testbeds.
The intention was also to promote the open source projects, while creating a framework for students to learn about these projects, to ask questions to developers and get a closer look at what means to be involved in open source.
It was the first edition, small but mighty! We got very positive feedback from the participating projects, from students and also on Linkedin.
The quality of the projects available for 5G is amazing already, definitely open source will have a key role in accelerating the evolution towards 6G!