DeSiRe-NG: An Architecture for Autonomous and Assisted 5G Network Measurement and Emulation

5G (and beyond) cellular networks have gained much attraction in the past for various application domains in context of industry automation, autonomous and cooperative mobility, as well as smart cities. A main commonality of those use cases is their strong reliance on specific Quality-of-Service (QoS) metrics, which are crucial for seamless operation of those applications. This especially holds true for 5 G use cases in the aviation domain, where a prominent application is the Virtual Table Inspection (VTI) - a process in which aircraft maintenance, disassembly, and reassembly are continuously monitored in real time via high-quality video and audio streams, enabling end-to-end tracking of quality control for all aircraft components. Providing concurrent high-quality video streams requiring high data rates and low latencies together with guaranteed packet delivery ratios is a main challenge of 5 G networks - that particularly holds for 5 G campus networks which are often difficult to scale. Our project DeSiRe-NG tackles exactly these shortcomings by providing a versatile architecture to detect under-performance of 5G networks. Further, our proposed architecture allows to generate the Digital Twin (DT) of a 5G network’s QoS, which helps to improve the research and development process of novel networking architectures and applications, as well as aid the continuous supervision of a network. In a first proof of concept study, we present the functionality of our system in an industrial environment.