“Design of a virtual testbed to evaluate performance in 5G and satellite networks.”
The thesis project of Moustafa Ali Omar, who earned a bachelor’s degree in Internet Engineering, aimed to study the possibility of emulating a telecommunications network infrastructure consisting of a 5G terrestrial segment and a satellite link, to analyze its behavior and performance in a realistic scenario. Through the use of open source technologies such as UERANSIM, OpenSAND and Free5GC, a fully virtualized testbed was built that can emulate a user terminal (UE) accessing Internet services, traversing both a fifth-generation mobile network and an emulated satellite link. The thesis analyzed critical parameters such as latency, throughput and bandwidth, focusing on a concrete application: the fruition of streaming video content. The tests performed showed the feasibility of this type of architecture even in the presence of the constraints imposed by the satellite channel, offering insights for future developments such as optimization via multicast on the gNodeB side.