In this tutorial, we show how to use OpenAirInterface (OAI) with a custom IAB implementation to set up a working IAB 5G network deployed on the Colosseum wireless network emulator and controlled by the RIC. The network will be made of 10 SRN, divided into 1 IAB-donor, 4 IAB-nodes (each one made of one softUE and one gNB), and 1 softUE connected to the last IAB-node. In this way, it will be possible to assess the performances of a linear IAB network with 5 hops.

IAB RAN

Prerequisites

In the remaining of this tutorial, we assume users started an interactive reservation on Colosseum with at least 4 IAB RAN nodes (oai-iab-ran), one OAI IAB-aware core network (oai-core-iab) to deploy the network. For both images the login is root and the password is pass. The IAB network is then controlled by iab-manager, that can be run either locally or in the core network node.

Linear IAB Network

Once the reservation is ready, iab-manager can be used to interact with the different components. First of all, if you haven’t already downloaded it, clone the iab-manager repo on your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/wineslab/iab-manager.git

Then enter the directory and create a .env in the main folder containing your Colosseum credentials in the format:

COLOSSEUM_USER = [username]
COLOSSEUM_PWD = [pwd]

This will allow iab-manager to fetch the reservations’ data from the Colosseum API and automatically map the SRNs to IAB-nodes of your network.

Then, you must configure iab-manager through the config.yml configuration file. Create the file with the following content:

topology: "toy1.graphml"
scenario: 20055
scenario_nodes: 25
srn_blacklist: []
results_folder: "./results"
if_freq: 0

You can then run iab-manager:

python3 iab-manager.py

The software will connect to the Colosseum reservation API to fetch the information about the current reservation, then it will read the content of the topology from toy1.graphml, which represents the linear topology we want to deploy and finally it will map each SRN from the reservation to a node from the topology, which will then be mapped to a radio in the scenario. At the end of the setup, iab-manager will show a prompt that allows the user to interact with the running network.

First, let’s start the core network by typing core start.

Then, we can start the rf scenario by typing rf_scenario start.

Finally, we automatically start the network by issuing the command autostart.

It is also possible to start the network manually by starting first the IAB-donor, then the IAB-nodes and finally the UE: donor 0 start, iab_node start 12, iab_node start 34, iab_node start 56, iab_node start 78, ue 9 start.

The numbers in the commands above identify the id of the node, which is set in the topology file (toy1.graphml). In the case of IAB-nodes, since two SRNs are combined to form a single IAB-node, the id is set in a separate property of the graph called iab. In this example is set to the union of two single ids, so if an IAB-node is made of an MT with id 1 and a DU with id 2, its id will be 12.

RIC

To be updated.

Near-RT RIC setup

To be updated.

Non-RT RIC Setup

To be updated.