5WE

Project Description:

The 5WE project aims to bring “5G” advances to home Internet users. Benefits include SIM-based account management; a common experience whether users are connected via cellular, wired broadband, or both together; and better prioritization of sensitive user traffic during busy periods through 5G’s “Reflective Quality of Service” feature.

The project identified several new or in-development standards to support 5G home users, some describing user traffic and others addressing connection setup, and one project in progress to implement these standards. All of these use a popular ethernet VPN – the Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) – as a starting point.
5G user traffic is carried by a new protocol called 5WE, defined in the Internet Engineering Task Force’s RFC8822. 5WE presents itself as a “version 2” of PPPoE, modified to carry a 5G session identifier, 5G Quality of Service Flow Identifier (QFI) and 5G Reflective Quality of Service Indicator (RQI).
Before user traffic can flow, the connection must be set up. The Broadband Forum’s TR-456 and TR-470, both works in progress, describe extending PPPoE with a Vendor Specific Network Control Protocol and Vendor Specific Network Protocol to allow it to carry 5G SIM authentication messages to the 5G network as part of connection setup.
The Broadband Forum’s “OB5WWC” is actively building a reference implementation of these protocols.

In this phase of the project, we read the standards and the code for popular open source PPPoE implementations. We developed a working test setup using the Roaring Penguin PPPoE package and made a series of modifications to its code and configuration to start to align it with the new standards. We also set up and ran the partial implementation from OB5WWC.

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