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).
