Introduction

Aether is an open source 5G edge cloud platform that supports enterprise deployments of Private 5G. Information about the Aether project can be found on the ONF website, and an introduction to the Aether architecture can be found in a companion book:

Further Reading

Aether: An ONF Project.

L. Peterson, O. Sunay, and B. Davie. Private 5G: A Systems Approach. 2023

Getting Started with Aether

There are two ways to get started with Aether:

Other Aether guides included on this site include:

Note that Aether was originally deployed as a centrally-manged, ONF-operated cloud service, with the expectation that organizations would participate in Aether by connecting their edge site to this operational deployment.1 That service is now being deprecated in favor of users bringing up their own Aether sites using OnRamp. If you are looking for the original guide describing how to connect a site to Aether, it is still available in Version 2.1 of the Aether Docs. The operational issues described in that guide motivate many of the mechanisms available in the Aether platform today, but now refactored for others to apply to their deployments.

1

The original Aether service supported the Pronto research project, with edge clusters built on top of an SDN-controlled and fully programmable switching fabric. That fabric is no longer included in Aether OnRamp.

Aether Components

Aether uses components from several ONF projects. Information about these projects can be found at the following sites:

More information about 5G and Aether’s architecture can be found in the Private 5G: A Systems Approach book.

Community

Information about participating in the Aether community and development process can be found on the ONF Wiki. Join the discussion about Aether on Slack in the ONF Community Workspace.