5GCity has aimed at advancing state of the art in various areas and the results produced by the project are innovations with clear exploitation opportunities by many project partners. These have been summarised in the following in relation to the project objectives form which they’ve been originated.
Results achieved for Objective 1 (5GCity architecture design) consisted of various outputs which include: (i) Reference use cases, related target KPIs, major system requirements and architecture blueprint; (ii) Specifications of the high-level functional architecture and of functional subsystems; (iii) Core system interfaces and workflows among users and sub-systems. The project also elaborated a 5GCity Neutral Host business model, characterised in terms of service portfolio, major revenue streams and cost drivers. In relation to Objective 2 (MEC virtualization platform and guest optimization), the project developed technologies and solutions for edge node virtualization which optimised resources and implement additional trust capabilities in heterogeneous, recourse-constrained devices. For Objective 3 (network virtualization), the project developed an infrastructure abstraction function in the orchestration layer and a RAN controller capable together to configure network slices on virtualised eNodeB nodes by Accelleran (in use in all the three cities location of the trials) and Wi-Fi nodes (both proprietary by i2CAT in use in Barcelona and Ruckus wireless nodes in use in Bristol).
The Objective 4 (Scalable edge management & orchestration, and 5GCity edge service programming models) was achieved with two major output results: the 5GCity SDK and the 5GCity Orchestration Platform. The 5GCity SDK allows service designers (i.e. application developers and Vertical service operators) to define (‘edit’) their virtualized functions in an abstracted way and graphically compose the intended service function chain with slice-related deployment parameters and KPIs. The 5GCity Orchestration Platform allows to manage the registration of resources (compute nodes, physical networks, and radio access points), as well as their partitioning (``chunking''), allows to create slices as collections of chunks with (NFV) Network Services running in them. The 5GCity Orchestration platform supports the ETSI NFV MANO model and integrates ETSI OSM as core NFVO engine on top of a VIM layer implemented via OpenStack and fog05, the 5GCity MEC Orchestrator.
A core ultimate objective of the project was Objective 5 (5GCity city-wide pilots’ deployment and validation). Live trials were built and operated in Barcelona (ES), Bristol (UK) and Lucca (IT), all deploying the three tiers of the 5GCity architecture, i.e. Metro DC PoP, MEC nodes (street cabinets) and wireless network (at lampposts or on top of building roofs). In the cities, we used small cells operating live in the commercial LTE spectrum to stream contents from a local edge server towards LTE smartphones. Trials covered six selected used cases: Unauthorized Waste Dumping Prevention (in Lucca), Neutral Host (in all the three cities), Video Acquisition and Production (in Barcelona and Bristol), UHD Video Distribution and Immersive Services (in Lucca and Bristol), Mobile Backpack Unit for Real-time Transmission (in Barcelona). Tests in the live in-street trials allowed to demonstrate the feasibility of the 5GCity Neutral Host platform, to validate the correct operation of the technology components designed and developed in the project, to measure and monitor a set of pre-defined KPIs for 5G (and in particular those related to orchestration like slice creation time and service instantiation time), to measure and validate the platform and infrastructure solution also with respect to application KPIs.
During the entire duration of the project, 26 scientific papers were published or accepted (2 journal papers, 24 conference papers); presentations, keynotes and panels have been given in 47 key international events; 19 demos were showcased at various events with Verticals and 5G Community. At the end of the project, 2 open source projects linked to 5GCity activities (i.e. Unikraft and fogØ5), 6 contributions to standards have been produced, and other contributions have been produced to Open Source communities with KVM hypervisor patches, ETSI OSM VIM connector for Eclipse fog05, ETSI OSM Support of multiple VIM accounts. The project was among the most visible in social channels of the 5G PPP group and achieved a quite unique impact with 2,366 followers on Twitter.
