NR-Scope: A Practical 5G Standalone Telemetry Tool

Publication Year
2024

Type

Conference Paper
Abstract

NextG cellular networks are designed to meet Quality of Service requirements for various applications in and beyond smartphones and mobile devices. However, lacking introspection into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) application and transport layer designers are ill-poised to cope with the vagaries of the wireless last hop to a mobile client, while 5G network operators run mostly closed networks, limiting their potential for co-design with the wider internet and user applications.  This paper presents NR-Scope, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that can stream fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information to application servers to enable better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. Our experimental evaluation on various 5G Standalone base stations demonstrates NR-Scope can achieve less than 0.1% throughput error estimation for every UE in a RAN. The code is available at https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/NR-Scope.

Publication Status
Forthcoming
Conference Name
International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)
Date Published
12/2024
Publisher
ACM
Conference Location
Los Angeles, California, USA
ISBN
ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-1108-4/24/12
Publication Category