EmPOWER: Mobile Networks Operating System

What is EmPOWER?

EmPOWER is a new network operating system designed for heterogeneous mobile networks.

Top-Level Features

Supports both LTE and WiFi radio access networks
Northbound abstractions for a global network view, network graph, and application intents.
REST API and native (Python) API for accessing the Northbound abstractions
Support for Click-based Lightweight Virtual Networks Functions
Declarative VNF chaning on precise portion of the flowspace
Flexible southbound interface supporting WiFi APs LTE eNBs

Checkout out our website and our wiki

This repository is a fork of the EURECOM's OpenAirInterface with the EmPOWER eNB Agent and patches.

The EmPOWER eNB Agent is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

The OpenAirInterface is released under the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance license.

Pre-requisites:

Linux standard build suite (GCC, LD, AR, etc...)
Pthread library, necessary to handle multithreading
Protocol Buffers C++ (protoc) along with the C++ runtime (Version >= 3.0.0)
pkg-config, a helper tool used when compiling applications and libraries
Protobuf-c, Google protocol buffer implementation for C (Version >= 1.2.1)
Pre-requisites of OpenAirInterface5G
Agent and Protocol library from EmPOWER eNB Agent (EMAge)

Testbed

This software has been developed and tested on Linux, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with 3.19.8-031908-lowlatency and 4.8.1-040801-lowlatency kernel. Our tested consists of empower-openairinterface eNB, EPC and HSS running on a single host. But, the process is similar for environment with OAI EPC and HSS on a different host than the empower-openairinterface eNB.

Hardware:

Laptop with Intel® Core™ i7-5600U CPU @ 2.60GHz × 4
16 GB RAM
USRP B210 (UHD driver version UHD_003.010.000.000-release)
Nexus 5 with sysmoUSIM-SJS1 SIM

Software:

Latest empower-openairinterface eNB code from emage branch
Latest Openair-cn code from develop branch
Latest empower-enb-agent code from master branch
protoc (Version 3.1.0)
protobuf-c (Version 1.2.1)

Download & Install Instructions

Before downloading the code, please follow the instructions below:

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (32-bit or 64-bit)
Kernel setup https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/wikis/OpenAirKernelMainSetup
Disable C-states from BIOS (or from GRUB)
Disable CPU frequency scaling
Install low-latency kernel

empower-openairinterface requires protocol (libemproto) and agent (libemagent) library of EmPOWER eNB Agent to be installed before compiling.

Download and install protocol (libemproto) and agent (libemagent) library of EmPOWER eNB Agent:

git clone https://github.com/5g-empower/empower-enb-agent.git
cd empower-enb-agent/proto
make
sudo make install
cd ../agent
make
sudo make install

Create a configuration file by the name agent.conf and placed it in the /etc/empower directory. An example configuration file is provided in the folder conf/empower of EmPOWER eNB Agent repository.

Download and build empower-openairinterface:

https://github.com/5g-empower/empower-openairinterface

Rest of the instructions for building empower-openairinterface is similar to building OpenAirInterface5G, which can be found in the following link https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/wikis/HowToConnectCOTSUEwithOAIeNB

Once empower-openairinterface has been successfully compiled, you are good to go !!!

Running empower-openairinterface

Modify the configuration file for EmPOWER eNB Agent agent.conf to specify the IP address and port number at which EmPOWER (or other SDN Controller) is running.

In order to run empower-openairinterface, follow the instructions mentioned in the section Running eNB, EPC and HSS in the following link https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/wikis/HowToConnectCOTSUEwithOAIeNB.

The EmPOWER eNB agent can be enabled or disabled by setting or unsetting the EMAGE_AGENT flag in CMakeLists.txt file empower-openairinterface/cmake_targets/CMakeLists.txt.