Aether In a Box - 4G

Setting Up Aether-in-a-Box - 4G

Aether-in-a-Box (AiaB) provides an easy way to deploy Aether’s SD-CORE components and run basic tests to validate the installation. This guide describes the steps to set up AiaB.

AiaB can be set up with a 4G or 5G SD-CORE. We use SimApp to configure the required subscribers & network slices in SD-CORE for testing core functionality.

Helm charts are the primary method of installing the SD-CORE resources. AiaB offers a great deal of flexibility regarding which Helm chart versions to install:

  • Local definitions of charts (for testing Helm chart changes)

  • Latest published charts (for deploying a development version of Aether)

  • Specified versions of charts (for deploying a specific Aether release)

AiaB can be run on a bare metal machine or VM. System prerequisites:

  • Ubuntu 18.04 or later

  • Kernel 4.15 or later

  • Haswell CPU or newer

Clone Repositories

To initialize the AiaB environment, first clone the following repository:

cd ~
git clone "https://gerrit.opencord.org/aether-in-a-box"

mkdir -p ~/cord
cd ~/cord
git clone "https://gerrit.opencord.org/sdcore-helm-charts"

Note

Only one version of the SD-CORE (4G or 5G) can be installed in AIAB environment at a time. The first time you build AiaB, it takes a while because it sets up the Kubernetes cluster. Subsequent builds will be much faster if you follow below steps to delete & redeploy SD-Core (4G/5G) without destroying the Kubernetes

Running 4G Test

To deploy 4G SD-CORE using local helm charts:

make 4g-core

To delete 4G SD-CORE deployment

make reset-test

The above step performs UE attach and data test. If you wish to update any images of SD-Core 4G components then edit file in ~/aether-in-a-box/sd-core-4g-values.yaml. After updating config in sd-core-4g-values.yaml you can reset deployment and run the test again.

Developer Loop

Suppose you wish to test a new build of a 4G SD-CORE services. You can deploy custom images by editing ~/aether-in-a-box/sd-core-4g-values.yaml, for example:

images:
  tags:
    spgwc: omecproject/spgw:master-e419062

To upgrade a running 4G SD-CORE with the new image, or to redeploy the 4G SD-CORE with the image:

make reset-test # delete 4G deployment if it was already started before updating image
make 4g-test  #now this deployment will use new webui image

Troubleshooting / Known Issues

Deployment Status

If you suspect a problem, first verify that all pods are in Running state:

kubectl -n omec get pods

If the pods are stuck in ImagePullBackOff state, then it’s likely an issue with image name.

Test Failure

Occasionally make 4g-core (for 4G) fails for unknown reasons; this is true regardless of which Helm charts are used. If this happens, first try cleaning up AiaB and re-running the test. If make 4g-core fails consistently, then try to debug the issue by looking at spgwc, mme logs.