Open Air-Interface Evolution for 5G & beyond Experimentation

In this talk we give an overview of the activities of the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA) in relation to 5G architecture and in particular 5G NR. We start with an overview of the collaboration model within the OSA which allows for fruitful exchanges between academia and industry in the form of a non-classical open-source software community. The main feature of this community being to preserve the intellectual property policies of the 3GPP standardization process even when strictly open-source radio-access and core network software components are implemented. From a technical standpoint, we provide an overview of functional splitting possibilities and the deployment of OAI software entities on commodity computing equipment. Finally we provide some details of the low-cost deployment of a combined 4G and 5G-NR experimental network based on OAI in Sophia Antipolis.