Lightweight, portable 5G + edge testbed

A fully virtualized, reproducible 5G + edge lab that spins up on a laptop. The substrate for developing and testing MEC edge services.

challenge

Developing and testing MEC edge services normally needs a rack of hardware and a fragile, hand-wired setup. I wanted a 5G + edge environment that is lightweight, portable and reproducible: spin it up, get the same result, tear it down.

approach

Everything virtualized and containerized. A 5G core (Open5GS) on Kubernetes (K3s), provisioned end-to-end with Ansible over Vagrant / VirtualBox VMs, with an optional KubeEdge tier for the edge. A dashboard drives core, RAN and subscribers; access is secured with Keycloak.

result

A self-contained testbed that behaves the same on any machine, and the substrate for my MSc thesis at RISE, where I expose CAMARA APIs for indoor positioning on top of it.