A 5G Non-Public-Network (5G NPN) consists of different components which are all available in the testbed. The first component is the user equipment (UE), this is most easily described as a smartphone with a SIM-Card. The SIM-Card is the identifier and cryptographic device, required to access the network. Via cellular technology the user equipment connects to the 5G base station, where one or multiple cells can be deployed. The 5G base station consists of two primary components: the Radio Access Network (RAN) and the Core Network (CN). The RAN can utilize either commercially available hardware (COTS) or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). In contrast, the CN exclusively employs COTS hardware across all testbeds. The CN encompasses various network functions, including authentication and mobility management, session management, user data management, policy control, and the gateway to other data networks.
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) enable devices with radio capabilities to communicate with each other directly. Such networks are based on opportunity instead of planning: devices detect the existing network on their own and connect to it without further configuration. Therefore, WMNs provide flexibility and are easy to extend.
Our private 5G testbed is categorized into two main areas. The first is a university-wide 5G non-public network (NPN) that leverages commercially available hardware and software, ensuring continuous stability. This network facilitates application testing and interworking between 5G and other systems. Given its role as integral infrastructure, updates are solely installed by the central operator.
All components are interconnected to a central server hosting the 5G CN, GeniusCore.
The second category comprises lab testbeds within the ComNets Chair. These testbeds feature diverse hardware and software components to support individual 5G NPNs. They enable interoperability testing and measurements. Multiple legacy RAN systems are available, including Nokia and Huawei, which have been verified for interoperability with Open5GS (Open Source 5G-CN), GeniusCore, and OpenAirInterface CN (Open Source 5G-CN). Ericsson RAN is exclusively compatible with an Ericsson Core.
In addition to legacy RAN, O-RAN-based testbeds are also present. While legacy RAN is proprietary, O-RAN adheres to an open interface standard, promoting interoperability. O-RAN often operates fully virtualized on COTS hardware. Legacy RAN is disaggregated into three components: Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU), and Central Unit (CU) with open interfaces between them. The testbed employs COTS servers to execute the CU and DU, thereby reducing costs. Multiple disaggregated O-RAN systems are integrated into the testbed. One is a commercial system from AirSpan, while the others are open-source projects: OpenAirInterface and srsRAN Project.
For integration testing, All-In-One Small Cells are available. These compact and easy-to-operate gNBs can be quickly deployed due to their simplified operation compared to legacy systems or disaggregated O-RAN. Vendors within the testbed include: AirSpan Airvelocity n78 (2T2R), T&W/Node-H small Cell n78 (2T2R), LiteOn FlexFI n78 (4T4R), and NI USRP N310.
This testbed is build with a Nokia Radio A Consicess Network with five sites. The sites have the following Equipment:
Site 1: 1 x Nokia ASIL Systemunit, 2 x Nokia ABIO Baseband; 2 x Nokia AEQE n78 Antenna (64T64R mmMIMO), 1 x Nokia AWEUC mmWave (n258) Antenna (2T2R)
Site 2: 1 x Nokia ASIL Systemunit, 1 x Nokia ABIO Baseband; 2 x Nokia AEQE n78 Antenna (64T64R mmMIMO)
Site 3 and 4: 1 x Nokia ASIL Systemunit, 1 x Nokia ABIO Baseband; 2 x Nokia AWHQF n78 Antenna (4T4R)
Site 5: 1 x ASOE System and Basebandunit, 2 x AZQJ n78 Antenna (8T8R)
They are all connected to a central server, where the 5G-Core, GeniusCore is hosted.
The second is the lab testbed at the ComNets Chair. Here we have different Hard- and Software Components to run a private 5G network, based on different release. Here interoperability tests and measurements can be performed.
There are several classical RAN Systems available. Nokia and Huawei have been tested and verified to be interoperable with the Open5GS (Open Source 5G-Core); the GeniusCore and the OpenAirInterace 5G-Core (Open Source 5G-Core). Ericsson RAN is only compatible to an Ericsson Core.
The following classical cellular systems are at the chair:
Nokia; ASIK Systemunit, ABIL Baseband, AZQH Radio, 2 x Indoor Airscale Hub and 8 x AWHQB Indoor Small Cell n78 (4T4T); 4 x AWHQK Indoor Small Cell n78 (4T4R)
ASIL Systemunit, ABIO Basebandunit,
Ericsson 5G NSA System: Baseband 6630; Dell Server for 4G and 5G Ericsson Core, Radio 2212, Radio 8823, Indoor Radio Uni, Ericsson Indoor Small Cell
Ericsson 5G SA System (Industry Connect): Network Controller, Dot 4479, IRU, Micro Radio 4408 n78 (4T4R)
Huawei: Basestation 5900; Radio RRU5836E n78 (4T4R); pRRU5935 3.7G n78 (4T4R); Indoor Radio Hub
Besides classical RAN there are also O-RAN Solutions available in the Testbed. While classical RAN is proprietary, O-RAN is mostly software based and supposed to be interoperable. The classical basestation gets disaggregated into three components: RU, DU, CU with open interfaces between them. The CU and DU are supposed to be executed on COTS servers; thus, reducing costs.
There are two disaggregated O-RAN Systems in the testbed. One is the commercial system from AirSpan, the other one is the open source project of OpenAirInterface.
For quick PoC there are All-In-One Small Cells available. They are a small, easy to operate gNB and can be set up quickly as they are less complex than classical systems or disaggregated O-RAN. Vendors in the Testbed are: AirSpan Airvelocity n78 (2T2R), T&W/Node-H small Cell n78 (2T2R), LiteOn FlexFI n78 (4T4R)
Zheng, Ruifeng; Zhou, Pengjie; Hofmann, Pit; Cabrera, Juan A.; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
System Modeling of Microfluidic Molecular Communication: A Markov Approach Proceedings Article
In: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2026.
@inproceedings{Zheng0526:System,
title = {System Modeling of Microfluidic Molecular Communication: A Markov Approach},
author = {Ruifeng Zheng and Pengjie Zhou and Pit Hofmann and Juan A. Cabrera and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-05-24},
urldate = {2026-05-01},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)},
address = {Glasgow, United Kingdom},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Xu, Zhihan; Cabrera, Juan A.; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
Function-Aligned Nonuniform Quantization Graph Coloring for Distributed Functional Compression Proceedings Article
In: IEEE International Conference on Communications: Communication Theory (ICC - CT), pp. 5.9, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2026.
@inproceedings{Xu0526:Function,
title = {Function-Aligned Nonuniform Quantization Graph Coloring for Distributed Functional Compression},
author = {Zhihan Xu and Juan A. Cabrera and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-05-24},
urldate = {2026-05-24},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Communications: Communication Theory (ICC - CT)},
pages = {5.9},
address = {Glasgow, United Kingdom},
keywords = {},
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}
Raman, Vignesh; Bassoli, Riccardo; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
Quantum Electromagnetic Curvature Resilience: An Information-Geometry Metric for Wireless Quantum Networks Proceedings Article
In: 20th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), pp. 5, Dublin, Ireland, 2026.
@inproceedings{Rama2026:Quantum,
title = {Quantum Electromagnetic Curvature Resilience: An Information-Geometry Metric for Wireless Quantum Networks},
author = {Vignesh Raman and Riccardo Bassoli and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-04-19},
urldate = {2026-04-19},
booktitle = {20th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP)},
pages = {5},
address = {Dublin, Ireland},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
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Schuler, Alexander; Waller, Travis; Bassoli, Riccardo; Bešinović, Nikola
Quantum computing for railway rescheduling: Literature review and future directions Journal Article
In: Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, vol. 36, pp. 101868, 2026, ISSN: 2590-1982.
@article{Schuler0326:Quantum,
title = {Quantum computing for railway rescheduling: Literature review and future directions},
author = {Alexander Schuler and Travis Waller and Riccardo Bassoli and Nikola Bešinović},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198226000333},
doi = {10.1016/j.trip.2026.101868},
issn = {2590-1982},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-03-01},
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journal = {Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives},
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Scheinert, Tobias; Nazari, Hosein K.; Liu, How-Hang; Senk, Stefan; Nguyen, Giang T.; Muehleisen, Maciej; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
Reliable Edge Control over 5G-TSN: Demonstrating End-to-End Prioritization with Inverted Pendulums Proceedings Article
In: IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2026, (accepted for publication).
@inproceedings{Scheinert2025:reliable,
title = {Reliable Edge Control over 5G-TSN: Demonstrating End-to-End Prioritization with Inverted Pendulums},
author = {Tobias Scheinert and Hosein K. Nazari and How-Hang Liu and Stefan Senk and Giang T. Nguyen and Maciej Muehleisen and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-09},
urldate = {2026-01-09},
booktitle = {IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference},
note = {accepted for publication},
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Schulz, Jonas; Seeling, Patrick; Reisslein, Martin; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
No Further Delay: Making Time an Ally of Edge Computation of AI Workloads Journal Article
In: IEEE Internet of Things Magazine, pp. 1-8, 2025.
@article{schulz2025:nofurther,
title = {No Further Delay: Making Time an Ally of Edge Computation of AI Workloads},
author = {Jonas Schulz and Patrick Seeling and Martin Reisslein and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11316165},
doi = {10.1109/MIOT.2025.3637145},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-12-25},
urldate = {2025-12-25},
journal = {IEEE Internet of Things Magazine},
pages = {1-8},
abstract = {Artificial Intelligence (AI) computation workloads are very challenging for resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Offloading of the AI workloads to edge nodes introduces network transport latencies that may make the offloading infeasible for low-latency applications. For applications that allow for anticipatory (speculative) computation with partial application datasets, e.g., scalable encoded images, we introduce and evaluate the concept of No further delay. We define No further delay as the optimal tradeoff time instant between waiting for more application data (which increases the latency) and starting the speculative computation (whose success probability increases with more data). We evaluate the expected negative latency achieved by anticipatory computing with partial application-layer datasets compared to computation on the device (with full datasets) with a novel adaptation of the speedup factor (ratio) from Amdahl’s Law. Previously, speculative execution has been limited to the instruction-level in microprocessor program execution; in contrast, we are the first to propose and examine speculative execution for application-layer datasets. For a computer vision inference workload with progressively coded JPEG images, we find that our No further delay approach with edge node offloading achieves three-fold speedups (despite the network latency to the edge node). This article serves as problem definition for a new class of AI mechanisms that should be developed in future research to estimate the optimal No further delay time instant based, e.g., on historical success rates of application-layer tasks computed with partial datasets.},
keywords = {},
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Tunc, Hilal Sultan Duranoglu; Halder, Joy; Bassoli, Riccardo; Fettweis, Gerhard P.; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
Leveraging Network Structure to Emulate Quantum Memory Journal Article
In: IEEE Network, pp. 1-9, 2025.
@article{Tunc2025:QuantumMemory,
title = {Leveraging Network Structure to Emulate Quantum Memory},
author = {Hilal Sultan Duranoglu Tunc and Joy Halder and Riccardo Bassoli and Gerhard P. Fettweis and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11305221},
doi = {10.1109/MNET.2025.3636661},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-12-19},
urldate = {2025-12-19},
journal = {IEEE Network},
pages = {1-9},
abstract = {Quantum memories, which play a critical role in various aspects of quantum networks—such as timing synchronization, fidelity preservation, network performance continuity, and efficient resource management—are not well-suited for practical deployment due to their high cost and complex implementation requirements. For this reason, in our study, we propose a low-cost and easy-to-implement alternative method called soft memory, which does not require any physical quantum memory hardware and is based on a delay-aware routing strategy. Under varying threshold and request time window values, we evaluate two key performance metrics—mean time difference and request success rate—across three types of quantum networks: (i) memoryless quantum networks, (ii) quantum networks equipped with fixed qubit storage time, and (iii) the proposed soft memory architecture. Despite requiring no additional physical hardware, the soft memory approach achieves a request success rate nearly equivalent to that of a quantum memory with 0.15-second storage time, while providing a lower mean time difference.},
keywords = {},
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Radak, Hristina; Scheunert, Christian; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
A Closed-form Solution to the Wahba's Problem for Pairwise Similar Quaternions Miscellaneous
2025.
@misc{radak2025:Wahba,
title = {A Closed-form Solution to the Wahba's Problem for Pairwise Similar Quaternions},
author = {Hristina Radak and Christian Scheunert and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07597},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-12-08},
urldate = {2025-12-08},
publisher = {arXiv},
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Kurt, Mehmet Akif; Nazari, Hosein K.; Pahlevani, Peyman; Nguyen, Giang T.; Gabriel, Jennifer; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
Collective Verification Strategies for Complexity Reduction in Homomorphic MAC Proceedings Article
In: 2025 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps): Workshop on Enabling Security, Trust, and Privacy in 6G Wireless Systems (GC Wkshps 2025-Security6G), pp. 5.91, Taipei, Taiwan, 2025.
@inproceedings{Kurt2512:Collective,
title = {Collective Verification Strategies for Complexity Reduction in Homomorphic MAC},
author = {Mehmet Akif Kurt and Hosein K. Nazari and Peyman Pahlevani and Giang T. Nguyen and Jennifer Gabriel and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-12-08},
urldate = {2025-12-08},
booktitle = {2025 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps): Workshop on Enabling Security, Trust, and Privacy in 6G Wireless Systems (GC Wkshps 2025-Security6G)},
pages = {5.91},
address = {Taipei, Taiwan},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Nunavath, Nikhitha; Chen, Jiechen; Simeone, Osvaldo; Bassoli, Riccardo; Fitzek, Frank H. P.
Communicating Properties of Quantum States over Classical Noisy Channels Miscellaneous
2025.
@misc{nunavath2025communicating,
title = {Communicating Properties of Quantum States over Classical Noisy Channels},
author = {Nikhitha Nunavath and Jiechen Chen and Osvaldo Simeone and Riccardo Bassoli and Frank H. P. Fitzek},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04913},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2512.04913},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-12-04},
urldate = {2025-01-01},
publisher = {arXiv},
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pubstate = {published},
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Patrick Enenche; Osel Lhamo; Tung V. Doan; Mahdi Attawna; Giang T. Nguyen; Dongho You; Frank H. P. Fitzek
In: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Montreal, Canada, 2025.
Patrick Enenche; Osel Lhamo; Tung V. Doan; Mahdi Attawna; Giang T. Nguyen; Dongho You; Frank H. P. Fitzek
In: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Montreal, Canada, 2025.
Patrick Enenche; Osel Lhamo; Tung V. Doan; Mahdi Attawna; Giang T. Nguyen; Dongho You; Frank H. P. Fitzek
In: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Montreal, Canada, 2025.
Patrick Enenche; Osel Lhamo; Tung V. Doan; Mahdi Attawna; Giang T. Nguyen; Dongho You; Frank H. P. Fitzek
In: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Montreal, Canada, 2025.
Interested students may contact us directly or write an email to Dr.-Ing. Rico Radeke or the respective supervisors.