Emulated Long Term Evolution (LTE) Analysis Environment

We propose to develop a flexible and scalable open-source emulation system able to deploy and analyze full Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks including eNodeB, EPC, and UE, integrated with proprietary tactical radio physical layers in EMANE framework. The LTE user-plane and control-plane functionality and standardized interfaces will be built based on OpenAirInterface (OAI), an open-source LTE software package, and extended with necessary components developed in-house or ported from other open-source frameworks. Shim Layers will be used for seamless integration of the LTE components with the EMANE platform and existing EMANE physical layer and/or MAC layer modules without requiring modifications. New interfaces and event management mechanisms will be developed to support LTE emulations. The emulation system will allow research and experimentation on utilizing LTE for tactical communications, integrating LTE into the existing tactical communications network architecture, and analyzing the performance of various use cases. Flexible experimental settings will be supported, and users can configure which emulation plugin components to instantiate and where they reside. The emulator includes all the necessary LTE control- and user-plane components and features. Additionally, it can scale up to many eNodeBs with hundreds of UEs per eNodeB via running on commodity PC hardware.