Design and Prototype of A Virtualized 5G Infrastructure Supporting Network Slicing

In this paper, we investigate how OAI can be used on top of M-CORD, and present the deployment results demonstrating a virtualized 5G Radio Access Network (RAN)-Core infrastructure on top of M-CORD. Currently, both Mosaic5G and mobile central office re-architectured as a datacenter (M-CORD) utilizes OAI and the cloud RAN idea to virtualize some RAN functions and core network functions. Both Mosaic-5G and M-CORD enables virtualization and softwarization of 5G RAN-CORE infrastructure following SDN and NFV principles. In M-CORD, such a feature is extended to transport network to manage traffic in fronthaul and backhaul network segment. Specifically, both Software defined network (SDN) and (NFV) are applied not only to dynamically slice the network resources but also to manage traffic engineering in both RAN and core network aiming to support the requirements of network services. The deployment results demonstrate the procedure integrating virtualized OAI RAN and core network into M-CORD.