5G SA Multi-vendor Network Interoperability Assessment

Fifth Generation (5G) is the latest generation of mobile networks developed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This new generation aims to end the one network fits all paradigm by solving many use cases, such as ultra low latency, enhanced mobile broadband or massive machine communication as occurs in Internet of Things (IoT), that previous generations such as 4G do not support. In order to enable these use cases and make them elastic, agile and intelligent, the use of virtualization and softwarization technologies that can be applied in all parts of the mobile network makes a difference. However, although this new generation is not yet fully implemented, more and more solutions are appearing that allow the deployment of the complete own 5G private networks with specific requirements and characteristics. Among these solutions, some of them are open-source, which, unlike the commercial solutions, offer high flexibility to modify and adapt them to each situation. In this paper, we present an end-to-end multi-vendor 5G Standalone (SA) mobile network setup to validate the operation of a system comprised of different software both commercial and open-source. To perform this validation, an integration of different types of technologies has been carried out for each part of the mobile network architecture, combining commercial and open-source solutions. In addition, during this integration, the different solutions have been virtualized to simplify the deployment and management of the network. The result addresses interoperability between different solutions, as well as a comparison between them.