FikoRE: 5g-network-emulator

Real-time applications and workloads increasingly depend on predictable connectivity, low latency, sufficient throughput and controlled packet loss. This is especially relevant for interactive media, industrial control, robotics, edge offloading, cloud-assisted applications and other services where the network becomes part of the application behavior. Testing these workloads only over best-effort or production networks makes it difficult to isolate network effects, reproduce conditions and understand which radio configurations satisfy the application requirements.

5G technologies should theoretically be able to fulfill many of these requirements. However, application developers and researchers often need a practical way to evaluate how real applications behave under different 5G and beyond RAN conditions before having access to a specific deployment or while exploring alternative configurations. Consequently, we implemented FikoRE, a real-time 5G and beyond Radio Access Network (RAN) emulator, to test and optimize workloads and applications under controlled, reproducible network conditions.

Goals

There are several emulators publicly available online, such as NS-3, SimuLTE or Simul5G. However, their complexity is extremely high, especially for non-telecommunications-specialists. We present FikoRE, our real-time 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) emulator carefully designed for application-level experimentation and prototyping. Its modularity and straightforward implementation allow multidisciplinary user to rapidly use or even modify it to test their own applications. Contrarily to the mentioned simulators/emulators, the goal of FikoRE is not mainly to understand and test the network, but study how the network and its different possible configurations behave for particular applications, use-cases and verticals.

As we want to test our solutions in with actual networked applications we designed FikoRE to:

• Work in Real-Time.
• Handle actual IP traffic efficiently.
• Handle multiple emulated users with real or simulated traffic.
• Model the real behavior of the network with sufficient accuracy.

Besides, we need the emulator to be simple to use and, more importantly, easy to modify for possible particular needs. Consequently, FikoRE:

• Has a high level of modularity to allow easy modifications.
• Follows a straightforward implementation.
• Is simple to use both as an emulator (real traffic) and simulator (simulated traffic).

Furthermore, as the goal is to test actual applications on different possible scenarios and understand the most optimal network configurations, we understand is crucial to allow to easily modify the resource allocation algorithms and procedures. We believe it’s a crucial step in which an optimal algorithm design can produce an optimal behavior of the network for very specific applications. For this reason, we have designed the algorithm to allow the users to easily implement and test their own resource allocation algorithms.

How to Compile and Run

To build the emulator, use:

make

This produces the executable at bin/fikore.

For a quick local check without privileged IP traffic, use:

make test
make smoke

To run FikoRE with a specific configuration:

For offline simulated traffic:

bash run_scripts/run_offline.sh
bash run_scripts/run_offline.sh config/offline_umi_n40_npn.ini
bash run_scripts/run_offline.sh -a config/offline_umi_n40_npn.ini

For real-traffic emulation with Linux namespaces and NFQUEUE, use the lab workflow documented in run_scripts/README.md, for example:

sudo BACKEND=host UE_COUNT=2 run_scripts/run_fikore_nfqueue_lab.sh up
bash run_scripts/run_dashboard.sh --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8096
run_scripts/run_emulated.sh config/emulated_rural_n78_single_with_background.ini

For emulation mode, sudo is required because namespaces, iptables rules, and packet queue access require elevated privileges.

Execution Warnings and Troubleshooting

When running FikoRE in emulator mode, you must press Ctrl+C twice:

-First Ctrl+C stops the emulator.

-Second Ctrl+C stops the iperf3 process and triggers the results plotting.

If you encounter Python errors such as:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'numpy'

it means that your Python environment is missing required libraries. The run scripts now prefer the repository virtual environment at .venv.

Recommended setup:

python3 -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install numpy matplotlib

If you use the wrappers under run_scripts/, they will automatically pick .venv when it exists.

Citing

If you want to use FikoRE in your research, don't forget to cite us!

@article{gonzalezmorin2023fikore,
  author  = {González Morín, Diego and López-Morales, Manuel J. and Pérez, Pablo and García Armada, Ana and Villegas, Álvaro},
  title   = {FikoRE: 5G and Beyond RAN Emulator for Application Level Experimentation and Prototyping},
  journal = {IEEE Network},
  year    = {2023},
  volume  = {37},
  number  = {4},
  pages   = {48--55},
  doi     = {10.1109/MNET.002.2200595},
  url     = {https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.002.2200595}
}

Description and Usage

For more info and usage check the wiki