SL-RFSIM: Enabling Scalable Multi-Hop 5G NR Sidelink Mesh Networking in OpenAirInterface
Simone Pio Candido, Jin Yan, Jérôme Härri
Abstract
Recent 3GPP releases have extended 5G New Radio (NR) Sidelink (SL) to support device-to-device (D2D) relay and multi-hop capabilities. This paper presents SL-RFSIM, a component-based experimentation framework extending OpenAirInterface (OAI) with scalable multi-hop NR SL capabilities. SL-RFSIM replaces the legacy OAI RF simulator with a broker-based publish/subscribe architecture enabling arbitrary peer-to-peer connectivity while preserving compatibility with the OAI protocol stack. The framework further integrates pluggable mobility, propagation, reception, and monitoring services, and supports Layer-2 mesh networking through BATMAN-adv. Experimental evaluation on the SLICES-RI research infrastructure validates the proposed architecture through representative mesh networking scenarios and identifies the current software bottlenecks limiting scalability. SL-RFSIM provides an open-source foundation for reproducible experimental research on 5G NR SL and future multi-hop cellular mesh networks.
Create a lesson
Related papers
DRL-driven RAN Slicing Management: A V2X-oriented Approach In Multi-service Scenarios
Daniel E. Garcia-Fernandez, Pablo Vera-Soto, Sergio Fortes et al.
Federated Learning for LLMs over Mobile Networks: Issues and Solutions in the RAN Transport
Emilio Paolini, Andrea Pinto, Flavio Esposito et al.
Resource-Efficient Semantic Communication for Heterogeneous Agentic Teams
Farhad Rezazadeh, Hatim Chergui, Lingjia Liu et al.
Spatio-Temporal Wireless-Optical Planning for Multi-UAV Networks
Binglei Wang, Huiru Ao, Fan Yang et al.
MoSE: Mode-Switching Expander for Mixed LLM Training and Inference
Fan Yang, Ying Zhou, Binglei Wang et al.
Can LLMs help find Ambiguities in Protocol Specifications?
Ziyue Dang, Sixu Tan, Atharva Nevasekar et al.