5G-Picture

The explosive growth of mobile internet traffic introduces the need to transform traditional closed, static and inelastic network infrastructures into open, scalable and elastic ecosystems supporting new types of connectivity, high mobility and new mission-critical services for operators, vendors and vertical industries. 5G-PICTURE will develop and demonstrate a converged fronthaul and backhaul infrastructure integrating advanced wireless and novel optical network solutions. Τo address the limitations of the current D-RAN and C-RAN approaches, 5G-PICTURE will exploit flexible functional splits that can be dynamically selected, to optimise resource and energy efficiency. This results in a paradigm shift, from RAN and C-RAN to ʽDis-Aggregated RANʼ (DA-RAN). DA-RAN is a novel concept where HW and SW components are disaggregated across the wireless, optical and compute/storage domains. ʽResource disaggregationʼ allows decoupling these components, creating a common “pool of resources” that can be independently selected and allocated on demand to compose any infrastructure service. Key enablers for DA-RAN are 1) network ʽsoftwarizationʼ, migrating from the conventional closed networking model to an open reference platform, supported through 2) HW programmability, where HW is configured directly by network functions, to provide the required performance. This will enable provisioning of any service by flexibly mixing-and-matching network, compute and storage resources without sacrificing performance and efficiency as is the case in today’s NFV-based solutions. To validate these capabilities, 5G-PICTURE will demonstrate converged fronthaul and backhaul services in:

• a smart city environment,
• a 5G railway experimental testbed showcasing seamless service provisioning and mobility management in high-speed moving environments, and
• a stadium with ultra-high user density, supporting media services.

Project's website: www.5g-picture-project.eu

Monroe

Overview

MONROE will build a dedicated infrastructure for measuring and experimenting in MBB and WiFi networks, comprising both fixed and mobile nodes distributed over Norway, Sweden, Spain and Italy. The mobile nodes will be placed on trains, busses and trucks, and they will play a key role to understand the MBB performance under mobility. The MONROE nodes will be designed such that they will be flexible and powerful enough to run most measurement and experiments tasks, including demanding applications like adaptive video streaming. MONROE will design experiments that measure the characteristics of MBB networks both in terms of performance and reliability. Furthermore, MONROE will allow experimenting novel services and applications on MBB networks. All nodes will be connected to three MBB providers, and often also to WiFi. This makes MONROE particularly well suited for experimentation with methods that exploit multiple links. In addition to information about network, time and location for experiments, MONROE nodes will have built-in support for collecting metadata from the externally connected modems such as cell ID, signal strength, connection mode etc. The measurement results along with metadata will be provided as OPEN DATA in regular intervals. MONROE will make it easy to access the system and deploy experiments on all or a selected subset of the nodes. The user access and experiment management system will be adapted from FED4FIRE project to make MONROE compliant with all other FIRE facilities.

Key objectives

The main objectives of MONROE are:

• To build an open and large-scale measurement and experimental platform, targeting MBB and WiFi networks, distributed over multiple European countries, with multi-homing capabilities.
• To operate this large-scale platform by providing both maintenance and external user support.
• To use the platform for the identification of key MBB performance parameters, thus enabling accurate, realistic and meaningful monitoring and performance assessment of such networks.
• To achieve a user-oriented closed-loop system design in which the experimental platform is open to external users , and where users are incorporated early on in the experimental design process.
• To provide Experiments as a Service (EaaS), thus lowering the barrier for using the platform to external users, by providing well-documented tools and high-level scripts to execute experiments, collect results, and analyze data.
• To develop models for sustaining and extending the platform and it’s usage beyond the project budget and project ending.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644399.

University of Thessaly is participating as an Open Caller.

Project's website:www.monroe-project.eu/

Fed4FIRE+

Fed4FIRE+ is a Research and Innovation Action under the European Horizon 2020 Programme addressing the work programme topic Future Internet Research and Experimentation. The project started on 01 January 2017 and runs for 60 months, until the end of 2021.

The Fed4FIRE+ project has the objective to run and further improve Fed4FIRE’s “best-in-town” federation of experimentation facilities for the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative. Federating a heterogeneous set of facilities covering technologies ranging from wireless, wired, cloud services and open flow, and making them accessible through common frameworks and tools suddenly opens new possibilities, supporting a broad range of experimenter communities covering a wide variety of Internet infrastructures, services and applications.

Fed4FIRE+ continuously upgrades and improves the facilities and include technical innovations, focused towards increased user satisfaction (user-friendly tools, privacy-oriented data management, testbed SLA and reputation, experiment reproducibility, service-level experiment orchestration, federation ontologies, etc.). It will open this federation to the whole community and beyond, for experimentation by industry and research organisations, through the organization of Open Calls and Open Access mechanisms.

The project also offers a flexible, demand-driven framework which allows test facilities to join during the course of its lifetime by defining a set of entry requirements for new facilities to join and to comply with the federation.

Fed4FIRE+ also continues to build on the existing community of experimenters, testbeds and tool developers and bring them together regularly (two times a year) in engineering conferences to have maximal interaction between the different stakeholders involved.

Project's website: www.fed4fire.eu/