Improving isolation guarantees, privacy and resilience in shared RANs

This paper is based on our previous work published at the Network of the Future conference 2024 that introduced an F1AP proxy, enabling strictly separated and hidden sharing of the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). We introduce new capabilities to the F1AP proxy, changing it from a simple stateful forwarder to an independent F1AP node that can react on its own to different events. This enables the proxy to handle more complex situations, for example during the initial registration of User Equipments (UEs), or when faced with a malfunctioning component. We demonstrate our progress by showcasing how the F1AP proxy can deal efficiently with an outage of a single tenants’ Central Unit. Only UEs of the affected tenant will be disconnected, while the process remains transparent to other UEs. The demonstration will also discuss how O-RAN can be leveraged to dynamically configure Quality of Service in the shared RAN. We will demonstrate the approach using a testbed with real UEs, connected to their respective core networks through a Software Defined Radio (SDR).