Open Source 5G Network Deployment

all right is to start talking every time you're ready to go yarm com Al righty as the last of you all trickle in is it working it's on there you go seems like it's picking me up all right cool our next speaker doesn't even have a bio for me to pretend to read so our next speaker will just be Andrew [Applause] Fox hello everyone I hope you're having a great day so far so far I've enjoyed the heck out of this so this has been amazing um so today what I'm going to be talking about is open- Source 5G Network deployment um and this is something that I have been doing research on for about

two or three years now and uh let's get right into it um so a little bit about me just really quickly um I am a recent graduate of Sunni poly Technic Institute um I have my bachelor's in network and computer security um while I was at school I was doing research on five G networks for about 3 years with one of my professors um and during that research I made about two Publications um which are available on Google Scholar if interested it covers kind of the same thing that we're covering today um so yeah that's a little bit about me so 5G um 5G is the fifth generation of mobile networks I know this is basic

knowledge I just I want to cover it um compared to 4G there a 100 times traffic increase um and 5G is in high demand because of its high bandwidth performance and speeds um everyone seems to need that nowadays especially in this fast moving World um we all need um high bandwidth performance for our networks when we're traveling and things like that so yeah that's a little bit about 5G um so how we're gonna make this 5G simulation or deployment happen is there's a collection of Open Source tools um we call this open AI cellular um they basically did research on a bunch of Open Source tools that are out there and kind of put them together and

made it so they can basically simulate a 5G Network right from your own device um and this could be a laptop it could be um servers it could be pretty much anything um as long as you have Ubuntu um as a operating system you can run a 5G Network right from your device so that's uh that's pretty cool and uh their main focus is on the research and development on AI enabled cellular networks um so that's kind of their main goal they want people to be able to experiment with networks um while it's all open source so um if you have an idea of something you would like to try um to run in a 5G Network this is the

perfect platform to try and do that um so some of the uh goals of my project that I was doing um was we want to install and deploy open AI cellular um that process takes a little bit of time um if you were at my um training yesterday when I was helping people set this up uh it took a it took a little bit to get the installation going so um installing and depl playing open a cellular um running different components that go into open a cellular which I will cover in a minute I'll go over those components um a denial service attack against this network um when I was doing my research I was trying to

figure out what I can do with this network I mean it's open source you're running your own network what can you do um and I thought you know what would be interesting I want to see if I can just completely take this network down and run a Deni service attack against it and see basically what would happen and I'll go over um how I did that and some of the results of that um and then also I'll go into some other projects and experiments that maybe you guys can try out if you're interested and things that I um didn't have enough time to try out but maybe you guys uh can so those are some of the goals of the

project so um some of the technologies that go into um open AI cellular include Docker and kubernetes um those are really part of the containerization of the different tools and software that we're going to be using we're kind of having them all separated in their own separate containers um Helm is going to be responsible for the um managing of the package packages that are all involved um we need them all kind of in logged in one place and that's pretty much what Helm is responsible for um and then the SRS Ram project um that's really the the simulation part when you put all these things together they focus on how do we actually get this network up and running

once we have everything all together so that's kind of what SRS Rand project is all about putting everything together and making that Network run so if you're interested I would take a photo of this this is a link to um information on how to install open AI cellular it gives you very detailed um instructions on how to do it um and you might um sometimes there's there's a few issues here and there but I definitely recommend you guys check out their GitHub page as well they have additional projects that go along with um uh these open a cellular basically so um I would definitely check those out so there are three main components that go into open AI cellular um so the

first one here on the left is what we call the EPC um it's essentially the logs for our Network once we get it up and running that's the first thing that we start we want to have our logs ready and ready to go once we have everything all set up um and it provides us with some useful information I know it's kind of hard to see um but uh it gives us some information such as when things are being attached uh unattached um tells you when services are being initialized um and some other things setup request um and things of that nature so it basically is just logging everything for us keeping everything um under control and if something happens

that's very useful for us um on the right side uh of the of the slide you will see um the G node b or essentially what is the cell tower that we're going to be simulating um and this terminal window also has um some very important information for us um I'm going to zoom zoom in on this picture a little bit it tells you when users are connecting disconnecting to our cell tower and it also provides us um with some other information uh kind of like handshake agreements for when uh the phones are connecting to the cell tower and things like that it tells us all of those uh things uh and then our last component

that goes into open aai cellular is of course the most important part your phone uh the phone that's going to be connecting to the cell tower um and this also will provide us some information it tells us the IP address of the phone once it connects to the cell tower and it gives us other uh information sample rate um what cell we're going to be connected to um and what other services are running on your phone while you're connecting to uh the cell tower so there's um a lot that goes into running all this um a lot of components that go into it so I high recommend um looking deep into the documentation there's so much that goes

into this that I can't fit it all in in 25 minutes um so yeah that's kind of the main components that go into this so um I when I was running this denial service attack I I wanted to collect information about what was going on during that time so I collected a few metrics while I was running this attack um I wanted to see if I can really break this thing unfortunately it did not it actually handled it pretty well so that was pretty cool to see um but uh so what I decided to do is I ran just the regular Network the connection the cell tower the phone everything connected for about uh 2 hours or so and

basically I collected the bit rate information of how the network was performing for the two hours and then I stopped it I ran it again but this time under a denial service attack and um it's it's kind of hard to see but there's kind of a slight um decrease in the bit rate over time um it's I know the graphs don't really I guess you can kind of see it a little bit further down so it honestly it handled it pretty well but I will say though with the denial service attack there's lots of spikes that go down throughout the two hours um so definitely it did have some impact but obviously it was still up and going

through the two hours so um but again very interesting to see happen in real time and mess around with it and just see what would happen and uh another metric that I collected was ping response time um I decided to essentially ping the cell tower for two hours along with collecting the bit rate and same thing run run it normally for two hours uh run a denial service for two hours and as you can see there were some large spikes that were going on during this uh during this attack and uh at some points even going above 750 millisecond response times um so there is definitely an impact on PING response time uh throughout that attack so that was uh

very interesting to see um so some other projects that we can get into um they offer a feature where you can do Network slicing with 5G so essentially if you want to set it up so for example let's say we're running a business and we have certain users that we don't want basically talking to each other um on that Network so we can essentially just split up the network have our regular employees on this part of our 5G Network have a part of you know HR on this part of the network essentially just splitting it up for us um so it's it's interesting to see how that process goes along um while you are running that so they have instructions

on that on the website as well um and I think that's that's pretty cool that you can mess around and you can set it up to do as many slices as you want you can do like a thousand slices and have the worst you know bit rate of all time um but um yeah it's pretty cool and then also they have a testing platform where actually you can run your own code essentially and you can run it within the network and see what happens so this picture kind of shows you what the testing platform looks like um there's essentially there's going to be an actor um which is going to be uh the the cell

tower or device and you can basically upload your uh script or code or whatever you have onto it and it will collect metrics for you for my experiment I figured it would just be easier to collect that information and put it in like a spreadsheet and do that but they have the option where it'll create the graphs for you in the end um and you can collect basically a bunch of different metrics that that you want you can set up your own custom metrics um which I think is really really cool um and yeah and also it provides you with logs of what's Happening while you're running these things and um yeah it's it's a really really awesome collection

of tools that you can use to run your own 5G Network right from your device um so let's see I'm going to really quickly pull up a um a video of kind of the installation process um so you guys can get an idea of how this process works so uh let's see so there's different parts that I go into this okay give me one second okay so um the first part is running the EPC um through um so basically each of the components are going to be running on different terminal windows so what I do is I have maybe about six or seven different terminal windows open on Ubuntu and I have everything all ready to go so on

the website it tells you exactly what to put in on each terminal so for this first one we're essentially setting up the EPC to run which again is our logs for our Network um and then once we have our EPC it's I'm copying over that so it can set up the EPC and then next we have our G node B which we have to export some information um before running that command to get that up and running it needs some additional information so I'm copying that put that there um and then uh last but not least uh the user equipment after this um that's going to be again in a separate

terminal so there I'm setting up the user equipment now this next part what we want to do is while this network is running we essentially want to be sending traffic within the network to make sure that everything is running correctly um so on this first um terminal window what I'm doing here is we're setting up um a server side um connection where um and basically the output of that I'm uh putting into a a text file so I have that output so I can use it make graphs and things like that so that's what I'm doing in this one terminal here and then in the next one we're going to have it from the uh user

equipment side um and we're going to have again I want to collect that information um so I'm putting it in a text file for me so I have it on the side and then we're ready to go I just what I like to do is I like to have everything set up and all ready to go in each terminal so I can just go okay this terminal is running okay let's move on to the next one until all of them are connected um and then also if you want to ping response time which that's what I'm doing here I'm pinging uh the cell tower in this scenario so that's essentially what I'm doing there and

hold on so so here is where I actually get the 5G Network up and running so first the EPC I'm going to hit enter and then that's so that's what it shows up at first when you first run it now what it wants us to do is it's waiting for us to start up the cell tower so here we are going to run our goob or the cell tower and sometimes this this takes a second for a connection to be made um to the logs and in this terminal window now I'm running the user equipment so in a second it's going to assign an IP address to the user equipment and we'll see that happen in real time we'll say

hey this this is the IP address of uh the user equipment uh sometimes it takes a second okay so I paused it there's it says a found cell um and it tells us that a connection has been made and this is the user equipment here um so it's saying a connection has been made to the cell tower um it tells you the sample rate um and it's hold on go back one second um when the user is connected it also will say that um in the G node B you'll say hey this user just connected to our cell tower um so that's essentially what that's going to do and now what I'm going to do is I'm

going to be running traffic on the network when in these two terminals to make sure that everything is running correctly and as you can see there's responses so that means that traffic is being sent between the cell tower and the user equipment which is exactly what we want and essentially you have your 5G Network running on your device so and again there's a testing platform that you can utilize with this um to collect even more information and um yeah this is a really cool collection of Open Source tools and I hope you guys really get to test it out try it on your own see what you can do with it be creative come up with something um and uh yeah

basically uh and if you want to connect with me I am free to ask you know any questions send me an email I'm here to help you guys and um I really appreciate the time guys thank you so [Applause] much uh does anyone have any questions yes can you take that picture this morning no this is actually no um oh yeah that's actually that's a good point uh no no I didn't take that this morning this was when I was at my school um last week of school and uh I didn't plan that I promise you but that that was good that was good uh any more questions yes you know

this that's a great question um actually so on their website they actually have a list of the exact equipment that they used so this can be can be implemented with you know Hardware um it's a little pricey but you can buy alternative cheaper equipment for that and yeah you can have that running right from your house you just just set it up yeah and all the instructions are right on their website so you can set that up um so if you're actually going to be using the real equipment yes um you do you do have to um there's a there's a whole process for that but if you're just running it right from your computer

like I did there's absolutely no problem this is all virtualized it's all right on your computer so no worries about that but Hardware do wor do worry about that um any other questions yes can simate can you simulate what Yes actually yeah you can um there's instructions for that on their website as well um they it's it's all right there yes but they do yep uh any other question yes what would be the consequences did well okay the may maybe maybe yeah you you want to make sure that you're not interfering with any other devices that are are in the area um there's there's a whole process of things that you have to do before you do

that um yeah that's that's all I'll say about that give you an

IDE the Federal Communications Commission of that country so even if you weren't in the US you would need to get a license to trans ones to do it legally and then if you were caught doing it illegally I think the Fairly standard from the FCC is ,000 every instance of whatever you're doing wrong and then they have a long talk with you if whoever showed up and for some frequency bands in the United States they won't necessarily come after you for violating it because you're not really impacting anybody's business to do it this you would be impacting Verizon T-Mobile AT&T yeah so so so please be careful please I would I do not take responsibility for what you guys do with

this please okay um but yeah um any other questions and again if you if questions come up later you can always email me I'm available and connect with me on LinkedIn all that stuff okay all

right right yeah right right right radio Amur radio right would be able to encrypt it but you would still be able to it you just have to make the techan license gives you right to frequencies and bands from basically me 475 gz and anything above 475 gz is free for everybody to use but nobody's that now most of this ing the reason you it is the lowend is like gz and you know there's a 10 gz band you might be able to use some of those frequencies a Down yeah and uh also I will say on the on their website you can reach out to the people who are part of the development they're very nice and they can help you

guys with setting up actual Hardware if you want to do that um they're the perfect people to ask about that um so uh yeah any other questions no all right thank you guys so much I really appreciate it