The fifth generation of mobile technology (5G) is positioned to address the demands and business contexts of IMT 2020 and beyond. Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), industry fora and research projects have identified as common ground the need for: i) enhancing the network architecture, in view of emerging technologies and features, and ii) pushing the envelope of performance, both from network and user perspectives, towards ultimate capabilities far beyond 4G, in support of a wide range of innovative use cases to suit various verticals. In this direction, several international research projects, address the challenge of proposing 5G testbeds. Especially under the EU-funded FP8 umbrella, the so-called 5G-PPP Phase 1 projects mapped the 5G requirements to specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and formulated the overall 5G architecture that will achieve these KPIs. The ongoing 5G-PPP Phase 2 projects are extending the performed work in Phase 1, by contributing to a selective experimentation of different technologies needed to validate the 5G architecture. With significant contributions from the research work of the 5G-PPP projects, the 3GPP standardization body is working on the 5G standard incorporating end-to-end (E2E) advances for the mobile network.
Finally, the 5G Infrastructure Association (5G-IA) has already defined the roadmap towards a 5G Pan-European trial network.
Irrefutably, the “Genesis of 5G” has entered the crucial phase of experimentation, and currently faces the challenge of validating the 5G network KPIs and verifying the 5G technologies with an E2E approach. Towards this objective, a key challenge is to integrate all the highly diverse results and technologies from R&D projects, to “glue together” the 5G picture and unveil the potential of a truly full-stack and E2E 5G Facility, to meet the targeted KPIs.
In this context, the article describes the key design principles and the innovative 5G Facility that the recently EU- funded 5GENESIS research project will build. The novel Facility will be composed of several so-called Platforms, i.e. enhanced existing 5G testbeds and related applications, which aim to address some societal challenges and still not fully solved technical aspects of 5G networks. Each Platform forms a validation setup and the combination of all Platforms build an open, flexible and distributed experimentation facility.
The Platforms shall be administratively independent, exposing open interfaces for inter-platform coordination, integration and verticals experimentation. A top-level management (federation) entity for the whole Facility is not foreseen. Instead, each Platform is independently managed and horizontally interconnected with the other platforms for inter-domain services. This approach promotes resilience and scalability and greatly facilitates platform management, being directly analogous to the operational ISP and Telco infrastructures.
The Platforms shall accommodate multiple experiments from various verticals and shall be able to simultaneously accommodate multiple services with different requirements (e.g., eMBB, uRLLC and mMTC) on the same infrastructure, hence, fulfilling one of the key features of 5G. This capability will exist in all platforms, driven by network virtualization and E2E slicing.
Each Platform will expose common APIs for interacting with experimenters, thus promoting openness, facilitating trials from vertical industries across Europe and enabling portability of experiments on the Platforms.
The five platforms of the 5GENESIS Facility and their main features are as follows:
- The Athens Platform provides a shared radio infrastructure (gNBs and small cells) with different ranges and overlapping coverage that is supported by an SDN/NFV enabled core and enabled edge-computing capabilities. It is conceived to showcase scenarios where multimedia content delivery and low latency applications coexist in large public-events.
- The Málaga Platform brings automated orchestration and management of different network slices over multiple domains, on top of the 5G New Radio (NR) access and fully virtualised core network to showcase Mission Critical Services (MCS) running in an Edge Computing platform and outdoor
- The Limassol Platform offers radio interfaces of different characteristics and capabilities, combining terrestrial and satellite communications, integrated to showcase service continuity and ubiquitous access in underserved areas together with interoperability of IoT components deployed within these areas.
- The Surrey Platform features multiple radio access technologies that can support massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC), including 5G NR and NB- IoT, combined under a flexible Radio Resource Management (RRM) and spectrum sharing platform to showcase massive IoT
- The Berlin Platform contains ultra-dense areas covered by various network deployments, ranging from indoor nodes to nomadic outdoor clusters, coordinated via advanced backhauling technologies to showcase immersive service provisioning.
