Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - 5GINFIRE (Evolving FIRE into a 5G-Oriented Experimental Playground for Vertical industries)

Teaser

5G network infrastructures and embodied technologies are considered as a key asset of this emerging common environment and instrumental for the digitalization of the traditional industries, so-called vertical industry application sectors. Addressing these key questions, the...

Summary

5G network infrastructures and embodied technologies are considered as a key asset of this emerging common environment and instrumental for the digitalization of the traditional industries, so-called vertical industry application sectors. Addressing these key questions, the main 5GINFIRE goal is to build and operate an Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based Reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of Experimental Facilities that not only integrates existing FIRE facilities with new vertical-specific ones but also lays down the foundations for instantiating fully softwarised architectures of vertical industries and experimenting with them. The initial instantiation of the Open5G-NFV ecosystem will be driven by the automotive vertical deployed across state of the-art 5G infrastructures, however, it will also be as generic as possible in order to host other verticals.
In order to offer its testbeds to a wide community of experimenters, the 5GINFIRE project will organize at least two Open Calls for experiments to be implemented and executed on the top of the 5GINFIRE experimental infrastructure. Furthermore, the 5GINFIRE Open Calls will also seek for further relevant testbeds to be integrated within the 5GINFIRE experimental framework and offered to be used by the experimenters.
The 5GINFIRE is, by design, a duality project that sets its overall technical objectives as a prerequisite for achieving a longer term strategic objective that aspires to resonate beyond its lifetime and act as valuable source of constant feedback. As such, it is indeed quite ambitious but at the same time pragmatic and feasible in identifying, building, and eventually specifying, a critical mass of technological components and optimal architecture designs.
In order to guarantee architectural and technological convergence the proposed Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based Reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of Experimental Facilities will be built in alignment with on-going standardization and open source activities, also targeted by other closely related programme activities such as FIWARE and 5G-PPP to name a few. Accordingly, the Open5G-NFV FIRE ecosystem may serve as the forerunner experimental playground wherein new components, architecture designs and APIs may be tried and proposed before they are ported to more industrially “mainstream” 5G networks that are expected to emerge in large scale.
Accordingly, the specific 5GINFIRE project objectives are defined as follows:
• Establish the first 5G NFV-enabled experimental testbed capable of instantiating and supporting vertical industries based on industry-leading and open source technologies
• Specify, Implement and Operate Verticals drawn from the Automotive Industry on top of the Open5G-NFV common experimental facility.
• Provide a platform for innovation in Europe specifically suitable for SMEs
• Develop open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) functionality and toolsets for experimental architecture instantiation featuring automation of deployment process, orchestration and lifecycle management aiming at enabling truly Open Experimentation that fosters innovation.
• Enable in-testbed and extra-testbed demonstrations in an open reference platform
• Open software and APIs for rapid prototyping and inclusion of new building block functionalities with the necessary metadata definition
• Accelerate the formation of an open European-initiated, global-reach, long-term sustainable community and liaise with other relevant initiatives to further the goals of this project.

Work performed

The requirements for a novel 5G experimentation infrastructure have been defined based on specifications of the automotive and IoT 5GINFIRE use cases. With it, interaction between the several elements in the use case, the wireless technologies in use, and the envisioned architecture for the use case operation in 5GINFIRE has been defined, including a corresponding architecture definition and specification of needed interactions and interfaces.
Furthermore, a 5GINFIRE portal for experimenters has been designed and integrated with the application composer toolkit, based on the OASIS’s TOSCA CSAR archive specification. Also, adaptation of the external software interfaces of OSM to the 5GINFIRE middleware and specifics of the 5GINFIRE and its use cases has been performed. Finally, the available 5G ITS infrastructure has been prepared for experimentation, including exposing the ITS 5G resources to be deployed and used by experimenters.
1st 5GINFIRE Open Call for experiments, new functionalities, and infrastructures has been defined and published, with the submission deadline on 28 February 2018. Furthermore, the project website has been established as well as the needed promotion material. 5GINFIRE organized two workshops in cooperation with other projects from the FIRE domain and established a cooperation with partners in USA through collaboration with NFS, where one joint workshop was organized and a follow-up event is planned for the next period.

Final results

The 5GINFIRE ambitions target a number of areas, to make technological and operational advances through experimentation in the context of 5G networks with involvement of vertical application sectors, along the following topics:
• Enabling Innovative 5G Experimentation through a collaborative Open Reference Experimentation Platform
• Setting FIRE into a technology convergence course
• Going Beyond FIRE and into 5G (5GinFIRE)

The evolution towards the new technologies enabled by SDN required by 5G and used for next areas such as connected cars imposes challenges that will force a dramatic change in the way that testing environments are provided. 5GINFIRE will continue, harmonize and standardize the successful technological developments in the area of testing from FIRE in particular as promoting the use of Software Networks (SDN, NFV) and its applications to satisfy 5G requirements, initially exemplified through the automotive sector. 5GinFIRE will bring testing frameworks to the next level, by introducing features that are considered essential by industry.

Website & more info

More info: https://5ginfire.eu/.