5G Programmable Infrastructure Converging disaggregated neTwork and compUte REsources

Project Information

5G-PICTURE

Grant agreement ID: 762057

DOI

10.3030/762057

Project closed

EC signature date 2 June 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 31 May 2020

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 7 997 250,00

EU contribution

€ 7 997 250,00

Coordinated by

IHP GMBH - LEIBNIZ INSTITUTE FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE MICROELECTRONICS
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5G-PICTURE (5G Programmable Infrastructure Converging disaggregated neTwork and compUte REsources)

Reporting period: 2018-11-01 to 2020-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

5G-PICTURE designed and developed a next generation converged infrastructure integrating a variety of advanced wireless access network technologies through novel wireless, optical and packet network solutions. This infrastructure will interconnect a large number of “disaggregated” compute/storage and network elements and deploy the concepts of hardware programmability and network softwarisation to facilitate the Dis-Aggregated RAN approach. This enables the provisioning of any service across the infrastructure by flexibly and efficiently mixing-and-matching network, compute and storage resources. This 5G platform offers: (a) support of 5G ICT and vertical operational and end-user services, (b) integration of heterogeneous network technologies (wireless and optical), (c) integration of communication and computation technologies, (d) softwarisation of network and vertical-specific components enabling a paradigm shift from network entities to network functions and (e) slicing for multi-tenancy and efficient resource sharing.

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

5G-PICTURE assessed and benchmarked the 5G-PICTURE system architecture, in terms of technical, energy and cost performance, using modelling and simulation tools with the aim to support global optimisation of the integrated and converged infrastructure. These tools were used to support a detailed analysis of the performance of the proposed solution and its comparison with alternative approaches in terms of specific KPIs including end-to-end delay, energy and cost efficiency, as well as scalability and sustainability potential of the proposed approach. This task also supported the process of architecture refinement activities.

Infrastructure components and programmable platforms were developed as enablers to deploy different functionalities into the network that can be specified using certain high level description and be deployed at run-time in support of a variety of ICT and vertical services. In particular, for backhaul services, suitable platforms and components have been developed to provide a highly programmable stateful dataplane with latency and throughput performance able to sustain the need of the 5G network, while for fronthaul services, reconfigurable HW platforms and elements have been developed to provide both SDN-based programmability and efficient allocation of the processing tasks with flexible functional splitting between the RUs and the BS.

Complete specification and implementation as well as the evaluation of the performance of a number of technical components in the form of concrete network functions: RAN functional splits over programmable platforms, some featuring IEEE 1588 capabilities, and network slicing for the converged FH/BH network for tenants requiring different RAN functional splits.

Work on the architecture of 5G OS, which bridges SDN controllers, NFV orchestrators and slicing systems. A 5G OS-based auto-adaptive, cross concept orchestrator and SDN controller has been designed. An orchestration solution to utilize heterogeneous resources such as GPUs and FPGAs was developed. All solutions provided in WP5 were validated, integrated and evaluated, most of them as part of WP6 demonstrations.

Demonstration and evaluation of the main architectural functionalities and solutions around three different project demo sites. Dissemination in venues like MWC, EuCNC, ICC, together with a strong presence in the 5G-PPP framework and related events has been of great success. Several products have resulted as outcomes of the project.

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)

Development of programmable platforms as enableres to deploy different functionalities in the network that can be specified using certain high-level description and be deployed at run-time on specific platforms. The provision of 16 novel Technical Components in the areas of RAN, transport and synchronization that represent a significant step towards the vision of programmable and disaggregated 5G network. Demonstration of the 5G OS, which can orchestrate a complete virtual Wi-Fi and LTE network service, including two wireless access domains a compute domain and a transit network domain, in less than two minutes. This is a very significant step forward in automating the provisioning of the complex network services involved in the operation of mobile network architectures. This effort is in addition fully aligned with the 5G-PPP overarching KPI of “reducing service provisioning time from 90 hours to 90 minutes”.

5G-PICTURE has planned and successfully delivered a number of unique field trial demonstrators including ICT and vertical services. These are (a) a number of rail services in a real life operational environment in Barcelona Spain, virtual reality, (b) public safety services in a smart city test-bed in the center of the city of Bristol, UK and (c) mega event services including crowdsourcing services and network slicing in a real and demanding operating environment the Ashton Gate stadium in Bristol, UK.

The main impacts are listed below:
- Regarding the technical impact, one can acknowledge the 5G-PICTURE architectural approach, which adopts the concept of sofwarisation and allows the creation of physical and virtual network functions that can be combined together to form any service dynamically on demand through service chaining. In addition, the ability to support infrastructure virtualisation and slicing allows the creation of different infrastructure slices that can be allocated dynamically to support different tenants. These capabilities allowed to co-host and bring significant impact to the way a variety of vertical industries operate and deliver their own services. Dis-aggregated RAN (DA-RAN), the underlying architectural principle of 5G-PICTURE, as well the hardware programmable technologies and the software tools developed in the framework of the project.
- 5G-PICTURE has enabled the further development of the technologies coming from the industrial partners; it has been shown that the products/advancements/enhancements generated by industry partners in 5G-PICTURE are in line with their individual business plans, thus these 5G-PICTURE outcomes will be directly fused in the partners’ product lines.
- 5G-PICTURE has promoted and supported the industrial development in Europe by involving big and small industries that have work together to set up European Partnerships that have led to relevant foreground. Individual and joint contributions presented this section and contributions to standard bodies give an idea of the relevance of project in this regard. Furthermore, it allows development of new products and services based on early information available from the standardization process.
- 5G-PICTURE academic partners (including the research institutions) have integrated 5G-PICTURE topics in their ongoing teaching activities, enhancing the current program with 5G findings stemming from 5G-PICTURE's foreground.
- Opportunities have been identified for joint exploitation between partners, creating additional benefits to the partners participating in the demos, together with future opportunities of joint collaboration.

- The project identified the pathway to contribute to ETSI TC RT, to ITU-T SG15 with a passive optical solution based on Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)-Passive Optical Network (PON). Additionally, to several open source projects, and in particular to OSM Release-5 with a new feature called Wide Area Network Infrastructure Manager (WIM).

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