Pilot 5G Sites

EVOLVED-5G proposal is built on top of two 5G-PPP ICT-17 experimentation infrastructures in Athens and Malaga, which have been developed in the framework of 5GENESIS project. Both facilities are equipped with 3GPP-R15 5G-NR infrastructure (Amarisoft, Nokia, Athonet) in bundle with a set of automation tools such as, Experiment Lifecycle Manager – ELCM, and Slice Manager to support the experimentation by vertical users. Both facilities are composed of distributed components (UMA campus / City of Malaga, NCSRD Campus / COS Campus), making feasible the testing across multiple domains, where needed, given the special requirements of each vertical use case. The expansion of those platforms towards an open, cooperative and fully futured 5G facility will be tree-fold namely i) realize the integration of 5G infrastructure with TSN for deterministic networking in view of supporting Industry 4.0 requirements, ii) implement one of the ETSI-IFA 028 architectures for multidomain orchestration, and iii) enable real programmability by implementing CAPIF and SEAL features, recently standardized to enable exposure capabilities through APIs to vertical users.

Athens

The Athens platform will be implemented on the Athens.5Glink (www.athens5glink.eu) testbed. Athens.5Glink is an open 5G testbed being built, set up in the city of Athens. The testbed is going to be extended so to offer the telecommunication ecosystem an E2E experimental 5G platform, showcasing features of next generation networks, with particular focus on software network technologies (NFV/SDN) and edge computing for small cell infrastructures.

Athens.5Glink consists of three different site deployments:

  • The campus of NCSR “Demokritos”, in north-east Athens, is a 150-acre area, combining indoor and outdoor environments, covered by five software-driven 5G wireless nodes and supported by an optical backbone.
  • The stadium of Egaleo, in west Athens, is going to be an actual “field” testbed, supporting a wide variety of real-life scenarios, ranging from massive MTC to flash crowd events.
  • The COSMOTE building (OTE Academy), to the north of the city, is a multi-functional complex, combining various indoor and outdoor usage scenarios.

The 5GENESIS Athens platform includes the following features:

  • Fully software-driven, multi-tenant and virtualisation-capable infrastructure
  • Micro servers integrated in each Small Cell, according to the SESAME and 5G-ESSENCE architectures for mobile edge services
  • SDN/NFV-based Management and Orchestration (MANO)
  • Extensive IT capacity (180 CPU cores, 1.5TB RAM)
  • Existing VNFs: vDPI, Security Appliances (Firewall, IDS), Network Monitor
  • Edge services: Transcoder, Video analysis (object recognition)
  • Radio front-end based on SDR platforms, fully reconfigurable
  • High-speed Internet connectivity (via GRNET/GEANT)
  • Fully configurable remote access (IPSec or SSL VPNs)
  • Measurement/test tools including oscilloscopes, signal/spectrum analysers, traffic monitoring tools (ntop, Prometheus, Apache Spot) and visualisation tools (Grafana)

SDN/NFV-based Management and Orchestration (MANO) with supported NFV MANO platforms: OSM, OpenBaton and TeNOR, End-to-End Network Slicing with predictable performance isolation, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) of 5G Networks, NFVI based on OpenStack (supporting VMs or Containers) and OpenDaylight, 5G (core + NR + UEs) Networks across multiple administrative network domains

Malaga

Malaga platform aims the validation of selected 5G KPIs in indoor and outdoor 5G scenarios. Technologies in the platform are focused on integrating 5G with other access technologies (4G, WiFi, fiber, …) with great automation capabilities to execute experiments both unattended and with real users. The initial plan, in the context of the project funded in ICT-17 call (5GENESIS), considers KPIs related to capacity, speed, latency, reliability, density of users, location accuracy, service creation time and network management (CAPEX/OPEX). The use cases to validate the KPIs are related to Mission Critical Services. Once the platform has been validated as a 5G environment, it will support other use cases and KPIs, coming from ICT-19 or from other projects. Expected use cases should require features related to eMBB and/or URLLC.

The physical infrastructure is mainly hosted and operated by University of Malaga (UMA), Malaga city (Police Department) and Telefonica. It is composed by 4 big areas:

  • indoor fully automated UMA lab for initial testing of technologies and services and for identification of baseline values for KPIs
  • outdoor UMA deployment for first testing of use cases in a controlled environment with and without real users
  • outdoor Malaga city center deployment for testing with real users, including the possibility of large scale events
  • edge computing platform at Telefonica premises in Malaga city (close to the access nodes deployed at the city center) to demonstrate the advantages of MEC capabilities

What can be supported:

  • Lab indoor/building outdoor/large area in campus and city
  • Extensible to cover vertical premises in the area
  • 4-5 cells at UMA and 15-20 cells at Malaga city center
  • 1-2 users (UE) in the lab, large community of users outdoor
  • Different mobility scenarios: static, pedestrian and vehicular in outdoor deployments, static, pedestrian, vehicular and high speed emulated in lab
  • Experimental and commercial UE and gNB (as far as they become available)

Fully software-automated, 5GNR, LTE-A, NBIoT, LTE-WiFi aggregation, GPS emulation, Slice Manager, NFV (Openstack, OpenNebula, MANO orchestrator,) and SDN in transport and core, edge computing for low latency services.