Experiments
5G-enabled Context and situational Awareness detection with machine learninG techniques of city objects in Experimental vertical instances (5G-CAGE)
The 5G standards provided by 3GPP already bring support for mission critical communications, with support for low latency flows, dynamic allocation of resources, resource isolation and push-to-video. However, despite such features, diverse applications, known as Application Functions (AFs) in the 3GPP Service Based Architecture (SBA), need to communicate their specialized requirements to the 5G Core (5GC) when employed in mission critical services. With Sec5G, OneSource aims at validating the concept of employing NEF as the entry point for Public Protection and Disaster Recovery (PPDR) services in the 5GC, enabling the adjustment of 5G networks to the requirements of such services. While NEF can enable the wider adoption of 5G by providing a set of functionalities allowing a dynamic configuration of the network, performance, security and reliability are of utmost importance for PPDR missions.
The 5G Driving Trainer (5G-DT) system consists of a proof of concept prototype able to perform real-time image processing of moving vehicles and elaborating solutions for safe, correct and ecological driving behavior.
The experimentation includes VNF instances for the 5G-DT data collection and processing along with the 5G-DT edge computing system, deployed at the edge of the infrastructure. Such an hybrid architecture permits, on the one hand, to efficiently process video streams closer to the sources and on the other hand, to take advantage of the distributed cloud 5GINFIRE infrastructure for global data aggregation and data fusion.
Interaction with OBU is experimented to evaluate the overall system performance and capabilities including the assessment of user experiences. Specific monitoring probes are also deployed to accurately collect and analyze latency performance.
5G-SAFTEY – Testing network slicing for the 5G Public Safety vertical
The 5G-SAFETY experiment has deployed a use case on top of the NITOS testbed, providing two services over two network slices, with a focus on the QoS-aware control and Network Functions Virtualization. The main goal has been the implementation of two competing network slices on NITOS’ LTE infrastructure: one emulating a MVNO Public Safety slice with high throughput and reduced latency requirements and the other emulating an OTT service provider (delay tolerant – best effort slice). Different resource management algorithms were implemented and evaluated in terms of performance gains when operating under computational resource limitations. The main conclusion of this experiment is that in NFV scenarios with two concurrent network slices sharing the same NFVI, dynamic allocation of resources based on QoS parameters observed by virtual probes is indeed an effective strategy to improve the network performance of the priority slice when it is subjected to heavy load.
From C-RAN to G-RAN: Carbon-Aware Autoscaling for Cloud Radio Access Networks
Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RAN) are getting more and more attention in 5G mobile networks domain because of their manageability, deployability, resource usage, cost effectiveness and energy efficiency. In 5G mobile networks, C-RAN presents itself as a flexible and dynamic infrastructure resource for multiple Baseband Units (BBU pool). Within a BBU pool, each virtualised BBU (vBBU) shares common physical resources such as CPU, memory and network etc. thus each individual BBU might contends for resources. With the increased users’ demands and limited availability of resources, it is imperative to employ an intelligent resource manager so that resources can be optimally utilised, and users’ demands can also be satisfied. This can also contribute in reducing the CAPEX and OPEX.
CAVICO – Context-Aware Video Controller for autonomous transport and security monitoring
Tests of the developed system that is able to control the video streaming on the basis of measured QoS and QoE parameters were divided into a few stages in order to minimize risks of errors in the developed software. The system was implemented in a client-server model. VNF based on a VM of Ubuntu Linux was deployed using 5GINFIRE Portal and it acted as a server site that manages the control process in a feedback loop between the server and client. The client site was designed and developed for a Raspberry Pi board equipped with a video camera. The Raspberry Pi board used the OBU device to communicate with the core network via available wireless interfaces. Moreover the OBU device provided geographic coordinates from a GPS receiver built in it.
Computation Offloading for Smart Touristic Sites – COSMOS
The COSMOS project develops a framework which enables the dynamic offloading of processing workloads from mobile devices to edge clouds to facilitate the deployment of smart touristic applications in crowded cultural areas, by capitalizing on the features provided by the 5GINFIRE functionalities.
COSMOS Objectives
- Dynamic computation offloading mechanism for the minimization of the energy consumption of the portable devices.
- Workload profiling for the computation of resource requirements of the VNF chain towards efficient VNF placement and load balancing.
- User mobility estimation by using measurement of motion sensors. The estimated position is taken into account for the offloading decision.
- Performance evaluation (i.e., measurement of provisioning and scaling timescales, micro-benchmarks to identify potential performance bottlenecks) with the VNFs (e.g., object recognition) that are deployed in COSMOS.
CV2XinFIRE is an experimentation project that proposed and implemented a set of actions and activities that can: a) significantly support development and deployment of the newly introduced V2X solutions, b) empower to a large extent the 5GinFIRE automotive vertical instance environment, c) provide visibility and impact boost for both FERON and 5GinFIRE in the developments of 5G and the automotive sector. CV2XinFIRE activities include:
- incorporation of the latest, rapidly emerging, but practically yet unexplored in real‐world conditions, C‐V2X (or LTEV2X) radio technology
- the development and seamless integration of radio control, parameterization and monitoring components into the 5GinFIRE framework as VxFs/VNFs;
- the experimentation for evaluation of fundamental radio, network and application‐level performance indicators;
- the showcase of multi‐technology proof‐of‐concept vehicular applications upon a virtualized environment.
DynamIc REsource instantiation and ConTrol for 5G content delivery netwORks (DIRECTOR 5G)
The DIRECTOR 5G project was conceived to investigate and to further improve the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) of end-users in 5G wireless network environments by utilising the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture and the HyDRA radio slicing technology. For the purpose of this project, a number of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) have been developed to support the propagation of NDN content requests (Interests) and replies (Data) over the Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) radio access technology using virtualized HyDRA radio slices and the 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology.
ExSEC
ExSEC aims at evaluating a set of new components, architectural designs and APIs, related to improving and assuring the security and resilience of network- and application-services deployed in distributed and hosted virtualised infrastructures and targeting different vertical sectors, before porting these to the emerging industrial 5G networks and cloud service providers. ExSEC addresses explicitly the security and robustness of cloud-native solutions.
The ExSEC framework consists of an innovative security orchestrator and a number of new security enablers offering visibility and control of the security and robustness of the verticaltenant network- and application-services. ExSEC can integrate with the northbound interface of the 5GINFIRE OSM orchestrator by means of a new MANO-NBI enabler and with the 5GINFIRE portal by means of a new security dashboard. A number of new security monitoring managers and agents/probes and security element managers are developed as virtual functions and integrated into the 5GINFIRE VxF repository.
The aim of FB5G is to test, validate and assess in the 5GinFIRE testbed the performance of FlowBlaze, a novel stateful programmable dataplane engine that can simplify network functions (NF) design and implementation, while providing high performance packet forwarding, and support for future hardware offloading to SmartNICs. FlowBlaze is an abstraction that can be implemented in an efficient DPDK accelerated software engine, conceived to rapidly design and deploy complex network functions hiding the complexity of software optimizations associated to the development of network functions.
The Network Functions tested in this experiment comprise: (i) QoS enforcement using a programmable per-flow token bucket; (ii) server private cluster load balancing; (iii) mobile edge cloud traffic offloading with dynamic GTP-U tunneling.
ICARUS experiment relied on the use of the PPDR ONE infrastructure, while the inclusion of the qMON network sensors was necessary mainly for the IoT data provision. Within this 5GINFIRE experimental framework, ICARUS experiment aimed at researching the 5G opportunity for Internet of Things (IoT) interoperability and openness framework through the agility provided by the use of SDN and NFV as engineering tools, which provide the distributed intelligence to analyze and manage traffic flows. In specific, ICARUS combined the agility of a virtual Deep Packet Inspection (vDPI) function with the flexibility of data protocol mapping functions (e.g. CoAP, MQTT, HTTP to generic UDP), allowing to the overlay IoT services to be automatically deployed and programmed by a single domain coordinator/orchestrator/experimenter. Our main objective of the SDN/NFV-enabled IoT ICARUS experiment was to expand the interoperability level of the 5GINFIRE/PPDR ONE by providing an agile manner for data interoperability. By coupling a vDPI-based protocol detection process with the automatic applicability of the appropriate SDN steering commands of the heterogeneous IoT traffic to the correct IoT protocol-mapping VNFs, ICARUS can achieve interoperable communications by providing to 5GINFIRE infrastructure the proposed interoperability functionalities.
The MARATHON (MAnagement of Radio Access neTwork slicing witH multi-applicatiON concurrency) experiment was conceived to investigate the practical implementation and management of network slicing in 5G systems. The experiment has been performed on top of the Wireless Network Slicing Functionality for 5G (WINS_5G) testbed platform provided by 5GinFIRE. The WINS_5G platform counts with capabilities for Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) virtualisation, referred to as Hypervisor for Software Defined Radios (HyDRA), developed by Trinity College Dublin (TCD). A central result of the MARATHON experiment has been the design, implementation and integration within the WINS_5G platform of a new component, called Radio Slicing Management Function (RSMF), that extends the HyDRA capabilities with a radio slicing provisioning solution that allows experimenters to dynamically create, modify and release radio slices based on pre-defined templates.
Mobile Device Virtualization through State Transfer (MIGRATE) proposes to use a virtual representation of mobile devices to gather and process data at the edge of the infrastructure network, at the same time a proper management of the mobility of the nodes is considered. Virtual mobile devices, implemented as VxFs, follow the end device movement through a “migration” approach among supported virtualization domains.
P4in5G: Flexible Data Plane Pipelines for 5G
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is one of the enabling technologies of 5G to increase flexibility of communication networks, deploying network functions as software on commodity servers. The development of high-performance network function software still requires deep target-specific knowledge, increasing the development cost and time. To describe packet processing pipelines in a protocol independent way, a domain specific language called P4 has recently emerged. For different targets, including both hardware and software, P4 compilers can be used to generate the target-specific executable program. Through the high-level abstraction of P4 the code complexity, the implementation time and costs can both be reduced.
P4in5G combines the advantages of 5G-NFV and P4 by offering P4-programmable VNFs based on the P4 compiler and software data plane solution called T4P4S (using DPDK backend). The proposed P4-enhanced VNF has been validated through use cases described in P4 language and performance measurements have been carried out with various settings in 5TONIC.
Wearable video for with 5G Slicing for Scale Testing
RedZinc provides wearable video, based on video headsets and can support, acute prehospital patients triage decisions, remote diagnosis, treatment and oversight. This improves patient outcome, optimizing healthcare pathways and making operational savings from enhanced efficiency.
5G Smart City Robotic Surveillance Platform – RobotView5G
NETICTECH is developing the Wireless Robotic Surveillance Platform “RobotView”, enabling real-time video surveillance using WiFi and mobile networks from remote controlled robots, drones and other video-monitoring devices. The platform is designed for police, security and rescue forces to enable surveillance and operation in places hazardous to humans. In times of heightened security risks, RobotView can save the lives of officers by allowing them to send a robot or drone and remotely watch the video from the installed cameras in real-time. RobotView is not bound to a specific solution, it is a vendor-agnostic system, allowing to transmit video coming from cameras installed on robots, drones or vehicles using wireless networks.
Sec5G: Securing 5G for Mission Critical Services
The 5G standards provided by 3GPP already bring support for mission critical communications, with support for low latency flows, dynamic allocation of resources, resource isolation and push-to-video. However, despite such features, diverse applications, known as Application Functions (AFs) in the 3GPP Service Based Architecture (SBA), need to communicate their specialized requirements to the 5G Core (5GC) when employed in mission critical services. With Sec5G, OneSource aims at validating the concept of employing NEF as the entry point for Public Protection and Disaster Recovery (PPDR) services in the 5GC, enabling the adjustment of 5G networks to the requirements of such services. While NEF can enable the wider adoption of 5G by providing a set of functionalities allowing a dynamic configuration of the network, performance, security and reliability are of utmost importance for PPDR missions.
Service Function Chaining orchestration application for low latency guarantees (SFCLola)
The adoption of Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking technologies allows network infrastructure operator flexibly orchestrating resources to provide tenants with their own virtual network. However, access to computing and network resource management APIs is typically allowed only within the infrastructure domain and rarely disclosed to tenants for security and performance reasons. This may severely limit tenants capability in coping with demands of application-tailored network services, including Service Function Chaining (SFC).
This work proposes an SFC platform (called SFCLola) providing tenants with a latency-aware SFC management while minimizing support required from infrastructure operators.
Hybrid Communications to Foster 5G Vehicular Services (SURROGATES)
In vehicular scenarios, on-board units (OBU) have evolved from specific purpose units designed for telematic services such as fleet management or road tolling, to generic networked nodes capable of interconnecting other in-vehicle devices, acting as mobile routers. Although virtualization of network and computing nodes is a reality in cloud deployments, it is expanding to the edge of the access network in scenarios involving multi-access edge computing. This scenario presents a good frame to offload data analytics tasks from OBUs, which should focus on actions of higher priority such as maintaining vehicle connectivity, managing communication flows or applying security measures to data traffic.
SURROGATES aims at virtualizing regular OBU tasks requiring a high computing load, on the basis of a hybrid communication system that allows a proactive connection between the real OBU and a virtual one. Over this channel, all sensor data collected from the vehicles are reported. The virtual OBU provides pre-processed information to be used by cloud services in the area of mobility and pollution, which will be accessible as a telematic service by final users.
TelMed5G – Professional telemedical platform for 5G networks
Currently, the type and level of medical competence is highly location-dependent. The procedures involving travel of either the patient or medical personnel are risky, costly and time-consuming. Especially in emergency situations time constraints often make multidisciplinary expertise impossible. Remote collaboration of doctors is an approach to solving these issues, saving both lives and money.
medVC is a scalable telepresence platform designed to be deployed in hospitals to enable real-time audio-video communication and remote collaboration between doctors. medVC consists of hardware medical end-points and extended services placed in the cloud. We focus on achieving the highest possible quality of medical picture and sending multiple HD video streams coming from cameras, microscopes, endoscopes, surgical robots and other medical equipment. We found out from the medical professionals we cooperate with that pure audio-video communication is not enough. Therefore, medVC is enriched with extended collaboration services taking advantage of the cloud architecture.
Tourist Eyes
The Tourist Eyes is proposed by vEyes, a non-profit organization whose mission is to develop assistive technologies for blind people. The objective of Tourist Eyes is to provide blind tourists visiting a smart city with a framework for assisting their activities, in both outdoor and indoor services. This experiment aims at using 5G-compliant connections, already deployed in the Bristol Smart City Testbed, to guide blind people moving in a smart city. As a first step of our project implementation process we will install IP cameras in the Millennium Square area, already served by the Bristol testbed, where volunteers simulate blind tourists moving in the Bristol city center, wearing a hat or a T-shirt with a specific color, in order to be localized by the system. Each blind tourist wears a small earphone connected to his/her smartphone to receive audio messages from the Tourist Eyes platform. Blind users can also send voice commands to request support regarding some point-of-interest, like restaurants, restrooms, museums, ATM machines. Thanks to the SDN/NFV paradigm available in the testbed, the personal Tourist Eyes service is realized as a set of elementary VxFs.
Realization of this experiment will bring benefit to both the proponent and the 5GINFIRE project. In fact, the proposer will see his application, already deployed and tested in a simplified setting for blind swimmers, enhanced with 5G facilities enabling new service components, not feasible without 5G. On the other hand, testing a mission-critical experiment, like the proposed Tourist Eyes, will provide 5GINFIRE project with significant feedback on the flexibility of the Bristol 5G testbed and of the 5GINFIRE platform as a whole in hosting new vertical services with specific KPIs, in terms of end-to-end latency and reliability.
Vulnerable Road Users Safety using a hybrid Cloud RAN and Edge Computing model
The main concept of VRU-Safe is related to the Safety of the Vulnerable Road Users, and the intelligent and effective prediction and avoidance of such accidents using technologies and concepts, which will be included in the 5th Generation Mobile System (5G), such as Edge Computing, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud RAN. VRU-Safe’s primary objective is the experimental evaluation of a network service with computing and networking capabilities, which is able to operate in a distributed manner utilizing either MEC, or Cloud capabilities (in the form of virtualized network functions), depending on the location and the network information of the involved OBUs and VRUs.
