Aether OnRamp is the recommended way to get started with Aether. It defines a step-by-step procedure for deploying and operating Aether on your own hardware, including support for 5G small cell radios. If you want to skip the documentation and jump directly into GitHub, start here.

Troubleshooting

General troubleshooting hints are included in the OnRamp Guide, but some of the issues people report are due to the specifics of their local environment or the hardware they are using. A summary of these issues and how they might be addressed are being tracked here.

Blueprints

OnRamp supports multiple configurations, known as blueprints. The current set includes the following:

• QuickStart: Configures the RAN emulator (gNBsim) to run in the same server as the Core. Serves as the default blueprint. Details documented here.

• Scalable gNBsim: Configures the RAN emulator (gNBsim) to run in one or more servers, independent of the Core. Details documented here.

• Physical gNB: Configures the Core to work with an external 5G radio (gNB), with the Core optionally running under the control of AMP.  Details documented here.

• Physical eNB: Configures the Core to work with an external 4G radio (eNB), with the Core optionally running under the control of AMP. Details documented here.

• Multi-UPF: Configures the Core with two UPFs and programs AMP with two slices, each associated with a distinct UPF. Details documented here.

• SD-RAN: Configures the Core and SD-RAN in tandem, with RANSIM (running in the same Kubernetes namespace as SD-RAN) emulating various RAN elements. Details documented here.

• UERANSIM: Configures UERANSIM in place of gNBsim, providing a second way to direct workload at the Core. Details documented here.

Users are encouraged to contribute new blueprints to OnRamp, making them available to the larger Aether community.

RoadMap

The following is a high-level Roadmap for Aether OnRamp.

Infrastructure Improvements

General improvements to the DevOps tooling/infrastructure that supports Aether.

• Migrate integration tests to JJB, accessed though GitHub.
• Migrate CI jobs to GitHub Actions.
• Make UPF subnet configurable (so can run multiple instantiations of Aether on the same LAN).
• Add option to install Aether behind a proxy.

Near-term Blueprints

Configuration options that OnRamp should be able to support. These features have previously been demonstrated in other settings, but need to be packaged for release as OnRamp blueprints.

• Configure with a second (and third) base station.
• Configure with other simulators (e.g., UERANSIM).
• Configure with UPF throughput optimizations.
• Configure with example edge app to demo local breakout.
• Configure with SR-IOV enabled.
• Configure with Monitoring Alerts.
• Configure with secure login using Keycloak.
• Configure with ElasticStack (collect and display logs).

Long-term Goals

Towards the goal of an end-to-end software-defined 5G network.

In addition to tracking the latest versions of SD-Core and SD-RAN, the OnRamp Roadmap is documented here.