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arXiv · 2610.01632

SL-RFSIM: Enabling Scalable Multi-Hop 5G NR Sidelink Mesh Networking in OpenAirInterface

Simone Pio Candido·Jin Yan·Jérôme Härri
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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.

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Simone Pio Candido, Jin Yan, Jérôme Härri. 2026-10-01. SL-RFSIM: Enabling Scalable Multi-Hop 5G NR Sidelink Mesh Networking in OpenAirInterface. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01632

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