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Roadmap

Planned and possible directions for the testbed, sorted by how committed each item is. Labels are explicit so the line between decided work and exploratory ideas stays honest.

Relationship with gaps.md: that tracker assigns a discrete status and notes per gap (current state). This file states priority and intent. The same topic can appear in both. Component maturity (what is validated versus experimental) lives in status.md.

In progress

Active development now, tied to the current thesis.

  • CAMARA Location + positioning. Location API on Open5GS with a pluggable positioning engine and a demo SPA. Deployed and working (phases 10-12); end-to-end validation and hardening ongoing. See architecture/positioning-adapters.md.

Near term (decided)

Committed work tied to the current codebase.

  • UERANSIM integration. Resume maintained automation for software RAN. This is the v1 prerequisite for a hardware-free end-to-end data plane; the validated path today uses a physical femtocell. See the reproducibility scope in status.md.
  • Resolve UPF-Edge CNI route conflict. UPF-Edge is disabled (replicas: 0). Restoring it requires fixing the CNI route conflict on the edge node. See known-issues/upf-edge-cni-route-conflict.md.
  • Reconcile optional phase gating. Make optional phases (6, 10-12) toggleable through first-class *_enabled flags in all.yml, make the main playbook self-gating, and surface the core versus full versus addon choice in testbed-config. Tracked in gaps.md.
  • Observability operations guide. User-facing documentation for the Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana stack from phase 7: accessing dashboards, writing alert rules, querying logs.
  • Surface hidden documentation. Link ansible/phases/05-5g-core/NF_ARCHITECTURE.md from the architecture navigation.

Candidate

Possible future directions. Not started and not committed. Listed because they are plausible, not because they are planned.

  • CI pipeline. GitHub Actions workflow to validate the deployment stack on push.
  • Physical RAN hot-swap validation. Validate and document switching between physical and simulated RAN on a running testbed.
  • Dashboard NF update detection. Compare deployed NF image tags against a canonical version list from nf-platform and surface per-NF update availability, with operator-triggered redeploy. Depends on nf-platform integration.
  • O-RAN near-RT RIC. Deploy a near-RT RIC (FlexRIC or OSC RIC) on the edge node as a KubeEdge workload and expose E2 toward a capable gNB. UERANSIM does not provide E2, so this implies OAI, srsRAN, or a physical O-RAN gNB.
  • NWDAF integration. Network Data Analytics Function for closed-loop analytics. Open5GS NWDAF support is partial; if it becomes a primary target, evaluate free5GC.
  • Multi-UE scenario coverage. Test scenarios and runbooks for concurrent registration, PDU session management, and QoS differentiation.
  • MEC application guide. Documentation and an example application consuming N6 user-plane traffic on the edge node.

Out of scope

  • Production-grade high availability for the 5G core
  • IPv6 across overlay networks and 5G interfaces
  • Multi-site or multi-cluster federation
  • Carrier-grade performance or benchmarking