Advantech Routers

Advantech routers (ICR-4453) are the testbed's 5G NR/LTE UE nodes with Quad-core ARM CPU and 1 GB RAM. They should contain ep5G sim card to connect to the network and get an ip.

Network Interfaces

They need two network interfaces to setup:

• eth0 (Primary): 1G RJ45 facing the management network with an static ip in the range 10.10.5.x/16 .

• eth2 (Tertiary): 10G SFP port connected to the tenants switches with an static ip 10.42.3.1/24.

5G Connection

They must be equipped with an EP5G simcard. The router will get a unique IP address from EP5G when connects automatically. Optionally, an SDR network simcard can be inserted for SDR connectivity.

Refer to https://eu.private5g.ericsson.net/network/sim-cards to create a new sim card. You can set an IP in the ep5G web interface for example 172.16.0.8 for sim card EXPECA-000.

Insert the new sim into the Advantech router. Without any more requirments, the Advantech router should connect to the 5G network if it is up and get the ip.

DNAT

In order to make these devices act as a middle hop to route the packets from eth2 to usb0 and vice versa, we use the default configurations of the router plus DNAT. The packets that start from the end-node and try to reach the server behind the 5G core, by default, because of the router's IP masquarade, find their way asking for the gateway. But, on the other hand, packets that arrive at the Advantech router, need to be forwarded to the end-node somehow. That is why we use DNAT on interface usb0. For instance, on a router that always get 172.16.0.8 assigned from 5G network, we configure DNAT to change the destination IP address of all packets arriving at usb0 to 10.42.3.2 which is supposed to be the end-node.

Use User Modules section on the Advantech router's web interface to install NAT v4.

• Install NAT module: https://icr.advantech.cz/products/software/user-modules#nat Version 4 should be chosen, here is the Direct link.

• Enable DNAT service and add a new rule: select interface usb0, set "To Destination" parameter to 10.42.3.2, and leave the rest blank.

Mobile Network Information Service

We run a simple HTTP server on the router that gives a JSON containing 5G connection information to any request.

SSH into the router which is connected to internet, then run the following commands to move the cross compiled binary to the device.

curl -LJO -k https://github.com/samiemostafavi/advmobileinfo/raw/main/ami
chmod +x ami
mv ami /usr/bin/

Add the following line to the scripts tab of the router web interface.

ami > /root/ami.log 2>&1 &

In order to test it, you can run the following command on the controller, if the management ip of the device is 10.10.5.1:

curl http://10.10.5.1:50500

For more info check here.