Third edition of the ‘5G Infrastructure PPP Trials and Pilots’ Brochure

Third edition of the ‘5G Infrastructure PPP Trials and Pilots’ Brochure

The new Trials and Pilots Brochure has been published on 7th October 2021 in the corresponding PPP website, available at:
https://5g-ppp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/5GInfraPPP_10TPs_Brochure2021_v1.0.pdf

This is a very high quality and impacting document, with the greatest achievements of the 5G PPP Projects.

The first two “5G Infrastructure PPP – Trials & Pilots Brochures” released in September 2019 and December 2020 highlighted 20 of the most impactful Phase 2 and Phase 3 Trials & Pilots. These were selected by a panel of experts that assessed their impact and potential.

The current Brochure n°3 leverages the experience from the previous Brochures (including call for inputs and selection by a panel of experts) and brings to the readers’ attention 10 additional Phase 2 and Phase 3 Trials & Pilots that were recently completed.

We are very happy to announce that our project has been selected from over 25+ candidates, with two Trials & Pilots:

E2E transport-aware orchestration

The 5Growth project validated, through field trials, the performance of 5G systems deployed on vertical premises. Significant advances were conceived by the interworking of 5G with a transport infrastructure under the direction of an orchestration platform. Cloud platforms were part of this synergy as radio functionalities and vertical applications migrate from dedicated platforms towards virtual machines running on commercial-off-the-shelf servers, located on the vertical premises (to preserve confidentiality and to reduce latency) or in the central office of operators. The 5Growth platform simplified the instantiation and operations of services and network slices over a virtualised view of the infrastructure.

All the potentialities of 5Growth were exploited in a pilot in Italy. Here, COMAU, Ericsson, TIM, Politecnico di Torino, Scuola Superiore S.Anna and Nextworks deployed three use-cases in the COMAU plant and in TIM central office. The experimental area was covered with 5G NSA. In June 2021, the pilot successfully demonstrated a cross-layer solution for the control of 5G slicing in support of end-to-end vertical services. The pilot iwa also linked to the 5G facilities deployed by the 5G EVE project.

The pilot architecture included: a shared transport network for running applications in a remote cloud platform and an E2E transport-aware orchestrator to handle 5G slicing in support of different QoS levels across radio, transport, and cloud infrastructures.

FIgure 1. Architecture of the pilot including the E2E Transport-aware Orchestrator

FIgure 1. Architecture of the pilot including the E2E Transport-aware Orchestrator

The E2E orchestration was based on 3GPP RAN slicing model/ETSI MANO, suitably extended for the automatic placement of VNF/PNF considering transport characteristics. Hence, the QoS mapping on slices became transport aware and enables the cross-optimization of radio, transport, and cloud.

The pilot included an Ericsson 5G radio network, operating on TIM’s spectrum, a transport network, systems for industry automation and IIoT platform by COMAU, and the E2E transport-aware orchestrator.

5G served three use-cases: (i) Digital Twin, requiring Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications, (ii) Monitoring & Telemetry, requiring massive Machine-Type Communications, (ii) Remote Support, requiring enhanced Mobile BroadBand and exploiting a multi-domain solution linked to the 5G-EVE infrastructure.

Figure 2. Deployment of the COMAU Pilot.

Figure 2. Deployment of the COMAU Pilot.

To assess the implementation of 5G slicing, the execution time to manage the network slices was measured in the 5Growth stack, which runs as Docker containers on a Linux machine. Cloudify v5.1.0 was used as open-source NFVO for the service orchestrator.

The measure, obtained by repeating 20 times the slice instantiation and termination, showed that the delay introduced by the E2E orchestration is negligible (1 sec) w.r.t. the delay of the open-source NFVO (21 sec).

The additional overhead introduced to control the radio resources was also negligible if compared with the time required to instantiate and configure the virtual functions, with a global service provisioning time that was on the order of 23 sec.

5G EMPOWERMENT
5Growth has conducted an in-depth business analysis for the COMAU pilot considering the application of the solution to a reference plant of 7700 m2 and serving 44 robots + a support team of 10 people. 5G enables more efficient service provisioning and operation, a faster change of production line and the predictive maintenance, loading towards hitless production. These represent the main advantages. However, the largest saving comes from the advanced predictive maintenance enabled by 5G. This means increasing the number of sensors fitted to equipment from one or two to measuring dozens of different parameters and ensuring that data is always reliably collected in real-time. Minimizing the interruptions means obtaining impressive savings.

 

Industry 4.0: Remote Operation of metrology machinery over 5G

According to VDI (the German engineering association), industry and metrology 4.0 will evolve into fast, accurate, reliable, flexible and holistic processes. Digitisation and 5G are essential tools for quality control paradigm transformation. To this aim, the 5Growth architecture and technology are vital enablers for more autonomous human-machine-information interactions over 5G networks.

This trial deployed 5G connected quality control services for workers 4.0, connecting anywhere, anytime, the M3 metrology software with the Coordinate Measurement Machine (CMM) and video system. This enabled personalised, remote decision, and quality control assistance. The trial was recorded for the 5Growth technical review in February 2021. The involved partners are Innovalia, Ericsson, Telefónica, UC3M, CTTC, IMDEA Networks, Telcaria Ideas, Nextworks, Mirantis, NEC and Nokia.

The vertical user interacted with the Vertical Slicer component of the 5Growth stack to instantiate and manage services in the form of network slices. Then, all required network services and resources were deployed and configured leveraging the multi-domain orchestration innovation to connect the 5G EVE platform deployed at 5TONIC site, as illustrated in Figure 3. The M3 edge application was deployed on the edge cloud with the 5Growth stack. The Interworking Layer component of the 5G-EVE platform coordinated the orchestration operations at the different domains. To reach the application, the 5G network (either NSA or SA), configured by the Radio Controller component of the 5G-EVE platform, provided the desired connectivity to the devices.

Figure 3. Pilot architechture.

Figure 3. Pilot architechture.

Figure 4 shows the field implementation. The devices on the left of the image, belong to the remote-control area and are connected to CPE 1. The scanning area is on the right of the image. The devices on that side are connected to CPE 2. The radio conditions are: (i) 3.5 GHz frequency band, (ii) 50 MHz 5G + 20 MHz 4G bandwidth, (iii) TDD pattern 7:3. For more detailed information: https://youtu.be/EBLm0l32iTQ

Figure 4. Pilot deployment at 5TONIC site.

Figure 4. Pilot deployment at 5TONIC site.

The radio segment offers UL peaks of 90 Mbps and below 10 ms one-way delay added to the TCP flow. Co-located device-to-device measured traffic metrics show: (i) video streaming constant demand of 20 Mbps and average RTT latency about 45 ms, (ii) irregular traffic patterns between M3 and CMM with peaks of 7 Mbps and average RTT latency about 30 ms. Also, the distance between sites has been emulated. Service QoE turns bad beyond 3000 km. Thus, feasibility and I4.0 competitive advantages are proved.

Figure 5. Experiment Results.

Figure 5. Experiment Results.

5G EMPOWERMENT
5G NR provides a reliable high-throughput performance, with a consistently low latency, improving previous mobile generations. The lower latency in the radio segment leaves a higher margin for operating the machines from far distances. The vertical application is deployed on the network edge of the 5G architecture, and only when needed. This saves costs for the verticals, as they do not need to maintain the hardware and the application at all their customers’ premises. Industries will benefit from the ubiquity of 5G commercial networks connectivity, that will allow to instantly connect the devices anywhere, in a faster, cheaper and more flexible way than cable. For all these reasons, the 5G solution is well suited for industrial SMEs.

Hits: 503