A research paper titled “Building a Low-Cost Cloud-Native 5G Network Slicing Experimental Testbed: Open-Source Solutions, Lessons Learned and Future Directions” was awarded the Best Paper Award at the South African Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC-2025). The paper was submitted by a collaborative team from the University of Cape Town (UCT), the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the University of Johannesburg, Technische Universität Berlin, and Fraunhofer FOKUS.

Humphrey Owuor Otieno, the lead author and UCT PhD candidate, drove the development of this work as a significant component of his PhD research, which focuses on enabling accessible and low-cost 5G testbed solutions for African research communities. He is supervised by A/Prof Joyce Mwangama.

The paper presents a practical and cost-effective approach to implementing end-to-end 5G network slicing using low-cost hardware, open-source software, and cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, and Helm. By extending the OpenAirInterface reference setup, the authors achieved slice instantiation, traffic isolation, and control–data plane separation using standard slice identifiers.

This contribution supports the democratisation of 5G/6G innovation, offering African universities and emerging researchers the opportunity to experiment with next-generation networks and develop solutions for healthcare, smart agriculture, IoT, and AI-driven applications, even with constrained resources.

The work received support from DIGITAfrica (EU Horizon Europe), the ARISE Programme, Google Africa PhD Fellowship, and the Telkom and SENTECH Centres of Excellence, with further expansion planned under the DIGITAfrica initiative toward a Pan-African, future-ready digital research infrastructure.