5GINFIRE @ EUCNC 2017

Special session on “Emerging trends for 5G experimental environments” at EUCNC 2017, Oulu, Finland

Special session date: 13 June 2017, afternoon

5GINFIRE is teaming up with SOFTFIRE and ORCA to discuss emerging trends for 5G experimentation during a special session at the EUCNC 2017 conference taking place in Oulu Finland from 12-15 June 2017.

The trend for 5G future networks is clearly dominated by softwarization at all levels, starting from Software Defined Radio (SDR) including Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) up to a software defined holistic environment for technical and business innovation integrating networking, computing and storage resources into one programmable and unified infrastructure.

The deployment of experimentation infrastructures to support this trend has started a while ago and has reached a level of maturity that allows offering such infrastructures to experimenters in order that novel components, systems and solutions are experimentally validated against demanding and sometimes extreme requirements.

New paradigms such as SDN and NFV are used in order to create a reliable, secure, interoperable and programmable experimental network infrastructure. Such environments are used to assess the maturity and industrial viability of these technologies by evaluating system properties in terms of efficiency, functional responsiveness (expressed in terms of measurable KPIs) and the ability to create new applications on the platform. [SOFTFIRE]

On the radio access network segment new wireless innovations are emerging, responding to extreme requirements, e.g. for ultra-low latency, ultra-high throughput and ultra-high reliability) as well as diverse communication needs. In order to meet at the same time diverging QoS requirements over wireless networks, control mechanisms are being introduced that allow the configuration and deployment of optimised radio slices that can be mapped to virtual network slices configured by SDN, as such realizing a joint SDR-SDN paradigm. [ORCA]

Business innovation is introduced over such transforming communication technologies leading to solution for verticals that are rapidly forming open ecosystems built on top of open common infrastructures and resources. This requires a high degree of technological convergence among vertical industries empowering them with enhanced technical capacity to trigger the development of new, innovative products, applications and services. In order to guarantee architectural and technological convergence the experimentation environment must be in alignment with on-going standardization and open source activities inherently forming a forerunner experimental playground for emerging “mainstream” 5G networks [5GINFIRE].

Three projects offering experimental infrastructures in this area will present the opportunities for experimentation, and a technological assessment in order to move towards industrialization and will solicit governance and technical requirements for facilitating the test, experimentation and consolidation of emerging solutions for 5G networks.