5G Networks

Source-level access to a complete emulated 5G core for experiments no production network allows.

Defense interest in 5G raised questions, whether zero-trust architectures apply to 5G network operations, and whether private network slices on commercial 5G can be genuinely controlled and separated, that cannot be answered on a production carrier network. Fraunhofer USA built a programmable 5G laboratory around the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open5GCore emulation system, giving software engineers source-level access to a complete emulated 5G core rather than the conceptually disjointed hybrid of emulated and physical components that most testbeds settle for. The team stood up an instrumented environment modeling the "airport of the future," a campus network carrying heavy pre- and post-flight telemetry, including working cloud PDU sessions, network slicing, and a connection path to a physical base station capable of handover experiments with up to 1,000 simulated user devices.