OpenAirInterface 10th Anniversary Workshop

Between September 12th and 13th, I was introduced to a growing and inspiring community of developers, researchers and students who are driving open-source, virtualized mobile network technologies. I’m referring to the OpenAirInterface (OAI) community, best known for its OpenAirInterface 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) Project, which focuses on the development of open-source 5G RAN software. With this software, anyone - from a curious hobbyist to a Ph.D. student like me - can deploy private 5G networks for experimentation and study of innovative mobile technologies and applications. The workshop last month marked the celebration of 10 years of OAI’s projects.

I had the privilege of presenting a poster to showcase my research during an intensive two-day workshop in the beautiful city of Biot, France. In my research, I propose and demonstrate a methodology to estimate the energy consumption of virtualized 5G base stations using indicators that, unlike energy itself (Joules), can be easily monitored at runtime, for instance the number of CPU cycles. To learn more, please refer to the poster here.

During my doctoral program, I have accumulated over two years of extensive experience with OAI’s software, having deployed a private 5G testbed in my lab in Porto, Portugal. As an end-user, I’ve long wished to connect with the developers and researchers driving the OAI project forward.

The two days I spent in Biot where certainly invaluable. I had the chance to connect with many like-minded individuals who offered a lot of insights on how to move my research forward. In particular, it was a pleasure to hear from Paulo Marques and Luis Pereira from allbesmart, who shared a lot of knowledge about using and contributing to the development of OAI’s software. It was a pleasure speaking with developers as well, especially Francois Taburet, and Laurent Thomas from the Open Cells Project. Laurent’s tutorials on using OpenAirInterface have been incredibly helpful to me over the past two years. Lastly, I was fortunate to meet Davide Villa from Northeastern University, who introduced me to Colosseum, a wireless network emulator that could prove invaluable in the near future as I’ll need to validate my work at a larger scale.

I look forward to the opportunity to reconnect with this community next year, and witness the advancements it will achieve in the meantime, with the hope to contribute to the project myself.

P.S.: I can’t wait to try French pastries again either, those macarons are to die for! 🤤