NIST Researchers Present 5G/6G Core Network Testbed to Korean Visitors

On 5-7 November 2024, NIST’s Transformational Networks and Services Group hosted a team of researchers from South Korea in a hybrid meeting, held at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and online. The Korean team was led by in-person attendees Prof. Jonghyun Kim of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)/Sejong Univ (3^rd person from the left in the top photo), Dr. Seongmin Park of Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) (4^th person from the left in the top photo). Dr. Dowon Kim from Korea (1^st person on the left in the top photo), currently at NIST in the NIST Cybersecurity Division, participated in person for this meeting.  Additional online participants included those from ETRI, KISA, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Sejong University, and Kookmin University.

The meeting included discussions on 6G security and associated collaboration research, and the NIST 5G/6G testbed. The Korean team discussed their concepts on trust-model-based intelligent incident response in 6G open network environments. They also described their goals to develop intelligent intrusion response technology including consideration of open architectures of 6G environments, decentralization of functions and network intelligence and creation of open standards. The Korean team is currently collaborating with University of Oulu, Finland, and the Finnish Institute of Technology.

The NIST team described the current NIST 5G/6G testbed deployment as including four bare metal servers and one managed switch. The deployment software, called 5gdeploy, has support for four Core Network (CN) implementations and six Radio Access Network (RAN) simulators, as well as two physical RAN implementations utilizing Software Defined Radio (SDR) units. 5gdeploy can automatically generate configuration files and initialization scripts for the chosen CN and RAN implementation, from a base template that defines the 5G network topology and configuration. It then deploys the 5G network onto the bare metal servers using Docker Compose containerization technology, which isolates the software environment and promotes reproducibility. Within this platform, researchers are given options to adjust the deployment parameters, such as placing the network functions onto different bare metal machines, restricting the CPU usage of a network function, or introducing traffic impairments. Researchers can then deploy traffic generators between the simulated 5G User Equipment and the Data Network, to measure how different choices of deployment parameters affect end-to-end network performance. The NIST team also presented testbed use cases that include teleoperation and edge learning.