Evolving FIRE into a 5G-Oriented Experimental Playground for Vertical industries

Project Information

5GINFIRE

Grant agreement ID: 732497

DOI

10.3030/732497

Project closed

EC signature date 24 October 2016

Start date 1 January 2017

End date 31 December 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 5 382 782,50

EU contribution

€ 4 999 970,00

Coordinated by

EURESCOM-EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND STRATEGIC STUDIES IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5GINFIRE (Evolving FIRE into a 5G-Oriented Experimental Playground for Vertical industries)

Reporting period: 2018-01-01 to 2019-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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 was to build and operate an Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based Reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of experimental facilities that not only integrates existing experimental infrastructures from the FIRE Initiative with new vertical-specific ones but also lays down the foundations for instantiating fully software based architectures of vertical industries and experimenting with them.

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 Open5G-NFV ecosystem of experimental facilities has been built in alignment with on-going standardization and open source activities, also targeted by other closely related activities such as FIWARE and 5G-PPP programs. 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 in the coming period.

In order to offer its testbeds to a wide community of experimenters, the 5GINFIRE project organized several competitive Open Calls for experiments to be implemented and executed on the top of the 5GINFIRE experimental infrastructure. Furthermore, the 5GINFIRE Open Calls were also seeking for further relevant testbeds to be integrated within the 5GINFIRE experimental framework and offered to be used by the experimenters as well as looking for further improvements of the 5GINFIRE experimental framework.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The requirements for a novel 5G experimentation infrastructure have been defined based on specifications of an automotive and a IoT 5GINFIRE use cases. With it, interaction between the several elements of the use cases, the wireless technologies in use, and the envisioned architecture for the use case operation in 5GINFIRE has been defined in details, including a corresponding architecture definition and specification of needed interactions and interfaces, which of course have been specified to respond to a wide spectrum of potential use cases to be implemented in the 5G arena.
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.

During its life time, the 5GINFIRE project organized four competitive open calls with an overall budget of almost 2,500,000€, looking for new infrastructures to enlarge the 5GINFIRE experimental infrastructure, new and additional functionalities to improve and enhance the 5GINFIRE experimental framework, and experiments to test innovative solutions on the top of the 5GINFIRE. The most part of the contributions (157 proposals in total) was received from SMEs, followed by Academia, and Research Institutions. This trend can be also observed for the 30 accepted proposals, where half of them are from SMEs.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Altogether 119 proposals for experiments have been submitted and 22 of them accepted, resulting with an overall success rate of 18%. The highest number of proposals has been received and accepted from SMEs. The main application areas addressed by the experiments were in areas of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation and various media related applications (multi-media streaming, real-time a/c surveillance, emergency services, etc.). Further experiments were focusing on optimizing various 5G capabilities (latency, slicing, security, energy efficiency, etc.) and some specific applications, such as IoT enabled application for tourism and accessibility solutions.

Furthermore, the initial 5GINFIRE experimental infrastructure, which included an automotive and a smart city testbed as well as 5TONIC facility, was extended through the competitive Open Calls to eight 5GINFIRE testbeds enabling remote implementation of experiments, by using the 5GINFIRE experimenter portal, and addressing various vertical sectors and 5G oriented networking experimentation. In addition, the 5GINFIRE established links with testbeds in Brazil through connection with the Federal University of Uberlândia.

A lot effort has been done to prepare exploitation and ensure sustainability. Organization of a Sustainability Expert group with 10 high level independent experts have been key recommendations which were followed to ensure exploitation as sustainability. In particular a lot of collective and asset in the 5GinFIRE test beds has been promoted for further exploitation. In particular the key actions have been undertaken as follows:
• Support to 5GPP TMV on methodologies with publication of a white paper that consolidate all contributions to 5GPPP communities and also the 5GPPP current projects (eg from ICT-17 and ICT-19 calls)
• Promotion of the 5ginFIRE portal with some success story of VEDECOM willing to use it in the automotive industry
• Promotion of 5GinFIRE offers of test services in some vertical domains with publication of test services offer and some success story with NEM willing to use the 5GinFIRE test bed in MEDIA domain
• Promotion of 5GinFIRE in industry through Plugfest and Hackfest such as the OSM Hackfest organized in September 2019

Individual exploitation has also been organized with partners and the 30 new third parties resulting at least to 11 new products to market with 9 coming from SMEs.

The 5GINFIRE experimental infrastructure

5GINFIRE Experimentation Workflow, Technologies and Infrastructures

Open Call Statistics for Experiments