Flora: Flexible Mobile Network Platform

Introduction

Flora is an open and software-defined 4G LTE/5G software networked system without commodity SIM cards, communication chipsets and dedicated infrastructure equipment. It provides a quick solution to setup a testbed based on OAI and Magma. Three salient features of our system are as follows:

• Built-in network analytics at both the device and the infrastructure, which provides runtime solutions to both what and why on network behaviors
• Customized system that allows the operators to optimize system latency and reliability
• New system-in-the-chain security that fixes the current broken 4G/5G design that poses security risks

For more detailed introduction, please refer to our documentation.

Testbed Setup

Flora now supports Ubuntu 16 and Ubuntu 18. We currently only support USRP SDR. USRP B210 and X300 have been tested successfully.

Flora provides a quick one-step installation script. To run it, simply do

    [flora]$ cd testbed-setup/scripts/OAI
    [flora/testbed-setup/scripts/OAI]$ chmod +x install.sh
    [flora/testbed-setup/scripts/OAI]$ ./install.sh

This script will install all the necessary prerequisite software and Flora. To start the system, connect USRP to the computer via USB 3, and run

    [flora]$ cd testbed-setup/scripts/OAI
    [flora/testbed-setup/scripts/OAI]$ chmod +x install.sh
    [flora/testbed-setup/scripts/OAI]$ ./run.sh

To connect a phone device to the testbed, you can purchase a blank Javacard and download the software from link. Write the correct credential into the Javacard as instructed. Insert the programmed Javacard into any commercial off-the-shelf device and connect to our testbed. For more details, see our documentation.

Base Station Analysis and Edge Computing

Flora supports in-depth base station analysis with costomizable analyzers. We also provide example applications for edge computing. For usage, please check our documentation.

Handover and Carrier Aggregation

Flora supports new cellular network features for research. In the current release, handover and carrier aggregation are supported. To enable them, please refer to this document.

Join the Community

If you have any technical issue, please go to Issues. For any other question, please contact projectfloranetwork@gmail.com.

License

Flora is Apache 2.0 licensed, as found in the LICENSE file. The eNB part of Flora is offered under the OAI Apache 2.0 license (link). The EPC part of Flora is offered under the Magma BSD license (link).