News

blueSPACE and 5G-TRANSFORMER projects held a joint demo at the ACM MobiHoc 2019 conference, with the participation of Nextworks, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Politecnico di Torino. The demo showed the provisioning and auto-scaling of network slices for a virtual Content Delivery Network (CDN) service with mobile and fixed users. Everything was running on-site on a portable realistic testbed, and the visitors experienced how the integrated system eases the delivery and management of customized network slices.

The Vertical Slicer and the Monitoring Platform developed in 5G-TRANSFORMER were integrated with the NFV Orchestrator, VNF and PNF Managers developed in blueSPACE, providing a network slicing and NFV MANO solution for lifecycle management of end-to-end services in 5G infrastructures. The system managed dynamically network slices customized for the CDN service, integrating the provisioning of mobile connectivity through the automated configuration of Distributed and Central Unit PNFs and vEPC VNFs to serve mobile users. Exploiting service-level monitoring information collected from the CDN application, the NFV orchestrator dynamically adjusted the number of media caches deployed at the network edge, based on the real-time traffic load, and reconfigured the VNFs to guarantee service continuity and QoS for mobile and fixed users.Figure 1: vCDN demo – service and platform components

Figure 2: vCDN demo – platform deployment

Figure 3: vCDN demo – video on mobile clients

Figure 4: vCDN demo – blueprint of the vertical service

 Figure 5: vCDN demo

More info about the conference: https://www.sigmobile.org/mobihoc/2019/

Source: 5TONIC

• The deployment, successfully achieved by Ericsson and Telefónica, includes a new 5G Massive MIMO Radio running on 3.5GHz band, along with virtual Evolved Packet Core and User Data Consolidation
• Part of the 5G EVE project, use cases of 5G-controlled Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and real-time video analytics running in the 5TONIC lab have been demonstrated by Ericsson, Telefónica and IMDEA Networks at EuCNC event in Valencia
• Ericsson, Telefónica and UC3M boost their partnership in 5G innovation with the launch of EU 5GROWTH project, collaborating with INNOVALIA on 5G solutions for Zero-Defect Manufacturing

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) together with Telefónica and IMDEA Networks have demonstrated brand-new 5G use cases for Industry 4.0 and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC) 2019 event held in Valencia, Spain, June 17-21.

During the event, two concurrent use cases executed over the same 5G end-to-end infrastructure at the 5TONIC lab were demonstrated on 5G EVE booth in Valencia. The first one showed ASTI commercial AGVs connected to 5TONIC’s E2E network being remotely and real-time controlled from the edge of the network, meeting the requirements of 10-20 milliseconds maximum end-to-end latency and 99,999 percent reliability.

The second use case characterizes both 5G network and deep neural network performance for real-time image recognition and video analytics based on video streamed across 5TONIC infrastructure to an edge cloud location to a deep neural network application. For both use cases a common KPI framework continuously tracks multiple KPIs – including latency, user data rate, reliability and 5G availability – all displayed on a simple dashboard, making it possible and easy for both communication service providers and vertical industries to carry out early and agile validations of innovative 5G use cases.

These milestone demonstrations were achieved only one year after the 5G EVE project was launched within the lab. In 2018, the 5TONIC co-innovation lab founded by Telefónica and IMDEA Networks in Madrid and backed by Ericsson was selected as EU 5G reference platform for open 5G experimentation and was awarded the 5G EVE project to support that mission.

“5TONIC has consolidated a virtuous cycle of exploration, co-creation and innovation in applied 5G uses cases, enabling 5G initiatives from a wide range of vertical sectors. The lab has certainly become the meeting point for 5G innovation in Spain, as well as a key reference for 5G R&D in Europe. From Ericsson, we are glad to contribute to 5TONIC with our 5G technology and expertise to support that mission”, says Manuel Lorenzo, Head of Technology and Innovation at Ericsson R&D Madrid.

Moving forward and as a result of the projects’ exceptional results, 5G EVE is also proving instrumental in achieving two basic aims of the 5TONIC lab: to expand its portfolio of vertical collaborations at both a national and European level; and to catalyse the deployment of 5G E2E infrastructure at 5TONIC lab to support those collaborations.

Further evidence of the new collaborations with verticals enabled by 5G EVE sees Ericsson, Telefónica and UC3M reinforce their alliance in 5G innovation by becoming key players in the EU 5GROWTH project, working in collaboration with Innovalia, in Spain, to develop and validate 5G solutions for Zero-Defect Manufacturing. This project was kicked off on June 10 and has a powerful international reach including the involvement of European operators such as TIM, Altice and Telefónica, vertical firms such as COMAU, EFACEC and INNOVALIA, and top academic institutions like UC3M, Scuola Sant’Anna, and Politecnico di Torino.

In parallel with the ecosystem development, on June 13, Ericsson and Telefónica successfully implemented 5G NSA technology at the 5TONIC open innovation lab. This new deployment includes a new 5G Massive MIMO Radio running on 3.5GHz band along with 5G virtual Evolved Packet Core and User Data Consolidation. The first 5G data transmission has been completed using a 5G WNC Pocket Router and tests will continue with new commercial 5G-capable routers and phones to cater for new uses cases at 5TONIC.

“Completing their 5G technology deployment at 5TONIC lab, Ericsson and Telefónica have fully activated 5G NSA according to Rel 15 of 3GPPP. The equipment supplied by Ericsson includes its sophisticated 6488 Active Antenna System (AAS), with Massive MIMO, and emitting on C Band with Telefónica license. The deployment also incorporates Ericsson Cloud Packet Core and Ericsson User Data Management and Consolidation , which provides complete network functionality for 5G networking at 5TONIC lab in IMDEA Networks premises. A number of experimentation and innovation activities encompassed in both bilateral collaborations of Telefónica with verticals and 5G PPP projects with involvement of Universidad Carlos III, Telefónica and Ericsson (such as 5G EVE, 5GROWTH, 5G-TRANSFORMER) will immediately leverage this complete Ericsson 5G platform”, says Arturo Azcorra, Managing Director of IMDEA Networks and Vice chairman of 5TONIC.

About ERICSSON

Ericsson enables communications service providers to capture the full value of connectivity. The company’s portfolio spans Networks, Digital Services, Managed Services, and Emerging Business and is designed to help our customers go digital, increase efficiency and find new revenue streams. Ericsson’s investments in innovation have delivered the benefits of telephony and mobile broadband to billions of people around the world. The Ericsson stock is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and on Nasdaq New York. www.ericsson.com

About 5TONIC

5TONIC was initiated by Telefónica and IMDEA Networks Institute with a clear vision to create an open research and innovation ecosystem laboratory in which industry and academia come together to boost technology and business innovative ventures. The laboratory promotes joint project development, joint entrepreneurial ventures, discussion fora, events and conference sites, all in an international environment of the highest impact. 5TONIC serves to show the capabilities and interoperation of pre-commercial 5G equipment, services and applications, by leading global companies in the 5G arena. The laboratory was recently awarded Digital Innovation Hub status by the European Commission.

EuCNC 2019 is the 28th edition of a successful series of a conference in the field of telecommunications, sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and the European Association for Signal Processing, and supported by the European Commission. This conference is one of the most prominent communications and networking conferences in Europe, which efficiently brings together cutting-edge research and world-renown industries and businesses. EuCNC attracts more than 600 delegates each year and an exhibition space of more than 1,500 m2. The conference focuses on various aspects of 5G communications systems and networks, including cloud and virtualisation solutions, management technologies, and vertical application areas. It targets to bring together researchers from all over the world to present the latest research results, and it is one of the main venues for demonstrating the results of research projects, especially from successive European R&D programmes co-financed by the European Commission.

EuCNC 2019 will be co-located with the Global 5G Event, which brings together the world 5G industrial associations: 5G-IA, IMT-2020, 5G-Forum, 5G-MF, 5G-Brasil and 5G-Americas.

List of all activities in EuCNC from 5G-TRANSFORMER:

 

• 5G-TRANSFORMER is co-organizing with 5G-CORAL, the SME WG and some other projects (To-Euro-5G, Global5G.org, 5G-TRANSFORMER, 5G-EVE, 5G-CARMEN) the following workshop:

Workshop 5: Emerging 5G Business Models: Opportunities for SMEs and large companies-lesson from 5G PPP (5G-EBM)

In this workshop, both MIRANTIS and Nextworks are giving talks providing their view as SMEs participating in the project.

• 5G-TRANSFORMER is one of the projects participating in the organization of the workshop sponsored by the 5G-PPP SoftNets WG: “Workshop 2: From cloud ready to cloud native transformation, second edition”

In this workshop, 5G-TRANSFORMER is giving the following talk: “Cloud native and RAN”, by Thomas Deiss.

• 5G-TRANSFORMER and 5G-CORAL host a booth, where 6 different demos will be shown: Automotive, Entertainment, MNO/MVNO, Cloud/Edge robotics, Automation and Federation.

• 5G-TRANSFORMER will participate in the “5GArch 2019: International Workshop on 5G Architectures” workshop, presenting a whitepaper chapter on Management and Orchestration, as well as participating on the panel session.

• 5G-TRANSFORMER has one paper accepted: “5G-TRANSFORMER Service Orchestrator: design, implementation, and evaluation”, Josep Mangues-Bafalluy, Jorge Baranda, Iñaki Pascual, Ricardo Martinez, Luca Vettori, Arturo Zurita, David Salama, Dmitriy Andrushko, Konstantin Tomakh, Giada Landi, Kiril Antevski, Jorge Martín-Pérez, Barbara Martini, Xi Li, Josep Xavier Salvat.

• 5G-TRANSFORMER has one poster accepted: “On the Deployment of Large Scale NSaaS”, Thomas Deiß, Bertold Dickhaus, Dereje Kifle.

More information

The complete program can be found on the EuCNC webpage.

The event will be streamed live in the EuCNC official TV channel on Youtube.

To know more about details about our participation, stay tuned to the 5G-Xcast and EuCNC social media accounts:

• EuCNC Twitter: @EuCNC
• 5G-TRANSFORMER Twitter: @5g_transformer
• 5G-TRANSFORMER Linkedin: 5G-TRANSFORMER EU Project

 

 

The 5G PPP Test, Measurement and KPIs Validation (TMV) Working Group released its first White Paper “Validating 5G Technology Performance – Assessing 5G architecture and Application Scenarios”.

This White Paper tries to be a first step into providing a more clear and homogeneous view over these topics, that will be briefly introduced and clarified. The idea is to establish a unified vision on the Test and Measurement topics for 5G, allowing for common procedures and terminology on how to solve some of these challenging problems. This is considered to be beneficial not only the 5G PPP infrastructure owners, but the entire 5G ecosystem. The technical direction is mainly the most predominant one, providing best practices, methodologies and applied solutions, focusing primarily on the actual testing and evaluation of 5G technologies. Nevertheless, the vision is providing substantiated answers to more high-level relevant questions such as “does slicing help fulfilling vertical requirements?”.

The White Paper can be downloaded here.

More information in the 5G PPP website: https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-ppp-tmv-wp-validating-5g-technlogy-performance-assessing-5g-architecture-and-application-scenarios/

 Last 22-23rd May, the 11th edition of the NEM Summit was organized in Zagreb.

The NEM Summit is an international conference and exhibition, organized since 2008 by the NEM Initiative for all those interested in broad area of Media, Content, and Creativity.

Over the years, the NEM Summit has grown to become an annual not-to-be-missed event, providing attendees with a key opportunity to meet and network with prominent stakeholders, access up-to-date information, discover latest technology and market trends, identify research and business opportunities, and find partners for upcoming EU-funded calls for projects.

The 5G-TRANSFORMER project had the opportunity to showcase a demonstration, called “5G Network Slices for Media Service Deployement” (video below):

 

Program of the event can be found here: https://nem-initiative.org/nem-summit-2019-program/

+ info: https://nem-initiative.org/

Future 5G networks promise delivering optimized services in three main usage scenarios: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), and Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC). The standardization of 5G has reached its first milestone with the 3GPP Release 15, while Release 16 is being clarified and first commercial products will soon appear on the market.

Compared to 4G, 5G pushes the usage of radio spectrum to the next level and enables the configuration of both radio access and the core network segments, thanks to the concept of network slicing and the use of virtualization technologies. Future 5G seeks to connect a denser more diverse range of devices, at far higher speeds with far lower latency and constitutes one of the most ambitious and challenging technology rollouts of the modern era. The success of 5G will depend to a great extent on how it is embraced by the new type of customers that 5G targets: the vertical industries. Practical experience with 5G deployments is needed, from customers, network operators and equipment vendors. In parallel to this, there are already some “beyond-5G” efforts appearing.

The goal of this Special Issue is to share research efforts on the design, adaptation and enhancement of beyond-5G mobile networks. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Practical experience on 5G deployment and usage. Lessons learned towards beyond-5G enhancements.
•  Improvements of radio spectrum usage, novel strategies for coverage/service extension, support of novel use cases and mobile edge cloud applications, usability of the current unexplored spectrum.
•  Enhancements of mobile network architectures aiming at significantly reducing energy consumption.
• Closed-loop automation and SLA control of automated vertical service lifecycle management.
• AI-based E2E network slicing solutions to combine optimization of RAN, Transport, Core and cloud/MEC resources, across multi-technologies, multi-vendors and multi-domains (federation).
• Applicability of AI/ML techniques to cross-layer optimizations in mobile network architectures.
•  Enhancements to NFV MANO based on AI/ML.
•  Orchestration and automation mechanisms capable of coping with extreme distributed and volatile resources (fog computing).
•  Machine learning techniques to optimize time and frequency slot allocation and minimize interference between devices in ultra-dense environments.
•  Optimal placement and movement of compute resources within a very distributed, mobile and heterogeneous infrastructure, including path movement prediction mechanisms to allow “follow-me” approaches.
•  Beyond-5G related standardization efforts in the relevant standardization bodies (IEEE, IETF, 3GPP and ETSI).

Please download the brochure here.

More information (including submission guidelines) available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics/special_issues/beyond_5g

Guest Editor 
Prof. Dr. Carlos Jesús Bernardos Cano
(http://www.it.uc3m.es/cjbc/)
Department of Telematics Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avda. Universidad, 30, 28911 Leganes (Madrid), Spain

Juan Carlos García, Technology & Architecture director at Telefonica GCTIO, visited 5TONIC and IMDEA Networks facilities on April 10th. He was presented the activity UC3M, in collaboration with 5G-TRANSFORMER partners, is currently performing in multiple use cases with verticals.

Representatives from leading companies in the sector, such as Ericsson and Intel, were also present in the meeting.

A number of presentations and DEMOS were shown up during the visit, which can be seen in the agenda of the event (below):

 

The “FrontHaul & BackHaul Convergence for 5G Use Cases” session took place last April 11^th in the 5TONIC Lab.

The 5G-TRANSFORMER project was invited to the Fronthaul & Backhaul Convergence for 5G event, running a live Mobile Cloud Robotics show. 

The main innovations that were shown were the following:

• The Mobile-Transport and cloud Platform (MTP) for real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions. The platform orchestrates radio, transport, and cloud to enable creation and operation of 5G based services for Industry Verticals.
   
• The underlying 5G transport network that provides fronthaul & backhaul interfaces for different use cases: wireline enterprise access, eMBB, critical and massive IoT communications, etc.
   
• The mobile cloud robotics use case where robots and automated guided vehicles (AGV’s) interact to manipulate and move objects in a working area inside the 5TONIC Lab.
   
   
   
  This activity was carried out in the framework of 5G-TRANSFORMER and 5G-Crosshaul EU projects where the MTP platform has been defined and realized. During the event, the technology that has been developed in the 5G-TRANSFORMER project, was presented to Telefonica’s business units.

The event’s work and effort was driven by Ericsson Research in tight cooperation with the Ericsson Network product management and with Telefonica involvement on 5G transport network capabilities. 

Below, the agenda of the event:

 

 

 

  

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a key standard development organization in the area of Internet-related technologies, met in March in Prague for a week. During this meeting (IETF 104), 5G-TRANSFORMER not only monitored relevant efforts at different Working Groups (WGs), such as Service Function Chaining (SFC), Internet Area (INTAREA), Network Management Research Group (NMRG) and Distributed Mobility Management (DMM), but also presented different contributions, among which we can mention the following:

–  Proxy Mobile IPv6 extensions for Distributed Mobility Management,  (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dmm-pmipv6-dlif/)

–  Distributed Mobility Anchoring,  (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dmm-distributed-mobility-anchoring/)

–  SPAWN use cases  (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bernardos-spawn-use-cases/)

All in all,  IETF 104 showcased the many different ways in which having a physical meeting can substantially advance the work of our community over the course of just one week’s time.

To learn more about the IETF104 highlights follow this link: https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf104-highlights/?primary_topic=6&

Arturo Azcorra, Vicepresident of 5TONIC, Full Professor at UC3M and Director of IMDEA Networks participated in the panel “Capitalising on operator’s assets for the industry 4.0 value chain” held on February 26 at Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. He gave a presentation entitled “How to deploy and run Connected Industry 4.0”. 

For years, operators have had a rich set of capabilities that can add value and offer huge opportunities to enterprises of all kinds, beyond connectivity and communications.

The conference discussion examined how you can really gain value fom the assets you already have and shared best practices from the leading edge.

In his presentation, he  introduces the complexity of Connected Industry 4.0, to put the spectator into perspective. Then he explains which are the three areas of complexity and their interconnections in the Connected Industry 4.0, to link them with the role the Operators will play in this ecosystem, their assets and challenges. To illustrate it, a summary of the main trials carried out or planned in the next future within the 5TONIC laboratory, where Telefonica is the Operator, is given. 

Video of the presentation available here: