5G Mobile Network Architecture for diverse services, use cases, and applications in 5G and beyond

Project Information

5G-MoNArch

Grant agreement ID: 761445

DOI

10.3030/761445

Project closed

EC signature date 2 June 2017

Start date 1 July 2017

End date 30 June 2019

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 7 681 088,75

EU contribution

€ 7 681 088,75

Coordinated by

NOKIA SOLUTIONS AND NETWORKS GMBH AND CO KG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5G-MoNArch (5G Mobile Network Architecture for diverse services, use cases, and applications in 5G and beyond)

Reporting period: 2018-07-01 to 2019-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

5G mobile networks are characterised by the goal to host a large diversity of use cases that enable ubiquitous communication through new services in e.g. industrial, media & entertainment (M&E), smart city, vehicular, or public safety scenarios. 5G has to satisfy differing requirements on e.g. network performance, reliability, or security, together with cost, and thus requires a flexible and adaptable network architecture as well as functional features that enable the implementation of specific use cases.
These challenges have been addressed by 5G-MoNArch, through its ultimate goal to create a 5G system that is actually usable in practice and proving its feasibility and applicability in real-world environments. The objectives have thereby been to: i) provide a detailed and fully-fledged 5G mobile network architecture design together with key innovations enabling the operation of 5G network slicing (i.e. logical isolated network sharing a common infrastructure); ii) develop features required to implement two verticals-defined use cases (industrial and M&E); iii) deploy and implement the architecture, use cases, innovations and technologies in real-world testbeds; and to iv) evaluate, verify and validate the developed solutions on their technical and economic performance. The overall project approach is shown in Fig. 1.
The 5G-MoNArch goals and objectives have been fully achieved. Based on the requirements and use cases of directly involved verticals, a flexible and adaptive network architecture framework that allows to fully integrate features for industrial, M&E, and smart city applications (and beyond) has been developed. The applicability of this framework and the developed features for reliability, resilience, security and resource elasticity in real-world environments has been showcased and proven with the Hamburg Smart Sea Port and Turin Touristic City testbeds and the simulation-based verification. The socio-economic verification has gone beyond this technical feasibility and highlighted the economic advances of the developed solutions, which has been finally validated through stakeholders.

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

First key result has been the fully-fledged orchestration- and network slicing-enabled 5G architecture building on network virtualisation, with the key features: multi-tenancy-capable network management & orchestration (M&O); dynamic resource sharing between slices; specification of slice-specific and cross-slice Network Functions (NFs); physical and virtual NFs integrated into a common framework; and separation between the data, controller, and M&O layers to increase flexibility. These key features have been realised through new algorithms, procedures, functional modules and interfaces (Fig. 2). The designed architecture is aligned with and complements 3GPP and ETSI standards, with a focus on customisability and expandability.
Second key result has been the development of the features for industry and M&E use cases. The industry use case focused on features to achieve failsafe and secure network operation through: i) high RAN reliability by implementing full data duplication (Fig. 3) and network coding techniques; ii) telco cloud resilience through cognitive fault identification and mitigation, robust network controllers and the 5G islands concept for autonomous NF migration; and iii) security through E2E threat analysis and the security trust zones concept. The M&E use case focused on AI and ML based features to achieve computational resource flexibility and efficiency in edge and central clouds (Fig. 4) through: i) computational elasticity providing graceful resource scaling based on load, through computational resource-accounting VNF design; ii) orchestration-driven elasticity for VNF scaling and placement reflecting NF interdependencies; and iii) slice-aware elasticity for E2E resource allocation across different slices exploiting multiplexing gains.
Third key result has been the successful verification and validation of the architecture, use cases and features, conducted through: i) implementing the two real-world testbeds; ii) verification of technical KPIs through network-level simulations (Fig. 5) allowing a wider deployment than the testbeds; iii) analytics tool-supported techno-economic verification of the results based on three evaluation cases, pointing out the commercial advantages and opportunities of the 5G-MoNArch technologies; and iv) validation of the results through direct interaction with 5G stakeholders (Fig. 6).
The Smart Sea Port testbed (Fig. 7) in Hamburg has implemented three slices for industrial applications: a traffic light control (reliable and secure), mobile air quality sensors on barges (reliable machine type communication), and augmented reality for port operations (latency-critical mobile broadband). The Touristic City testbed (Fig. 8) has implemented two slices for M&E applications: a 360° live video stream transmission (enhanced mobile broadband) and a real-time multi-user interaction (ultra-reliable reliable low latency). Both testbeds have been implemented by operators using pre-commercial vendor equipment and have been integrated with the vertical’s operation (Hamburg) or involved real end users (Turin).
The evaluation of the 5G-MoNArch technology has shown that i) RAN capacity gains of 10-20% and latencies down to 5ms can be achieved, ii) reliability levels of 99,999% can be provided for selected services, iii) new services can be deployed in minutes, and iv) slices are effectively isolated. The techno-economic analysis has shown a TCO reduction of 44% and ROI improvements up to 16% for industrial services, and a TCO reduction of 38-68% for demand hotspots.

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)

5G-MoNArch has considerably enhanced the 5G architecture and has introduced numerous features that are essential for actually implementing new services and applications with 5G. This is underlined by the adoption of results in relevant standardisation bodies (3GPP and ETSI with more than 70 accepted contributions) and industry fora collaborations (e.g. GSMA and NGMN), the 17 patent applications, and more than 80 scientific publications and presentations at high-quality venues and journals. 5G-MoNArch was core contributor in the 5G-PPP with respect to 5G architecture (white paper versions 2 and 3).
The adoption of 5G-MoNArch technology has been strengthened by the involvement of stakeholders outside the consortium through direct interaction (e.g. interviews, presentations) and the project presence at numerous events, including MWC 2018 and 2019 with booth presence and winning a GSMA GLOMO award, EU ICT 2018 with a well-visited networking session, three highly attended stakeholder events at the testbed locations with participation from different vertical industries, and at EuCNC 2018 and 2019 with own demonstrator booths.
The aforementioned activities clearly contributed to creating a sustainable business model for 5G through the proposed features that result in higher flexibility, lower cost, and improved service quality and user experience. These commercial opportunities positively impacted the business of the involved industrial partners already during the project runtime. Moreover, the high interest and positive feedback by verticals within and outside the consortium – on the use cases, testbeds, and socio-economic results – confirmed the relevance and timeliness of the project work and results and the promising business opportunities.

5G-MoNArch approach

Network-level simulator screenshot for Hamburg scenario

Turin Touristic City testbed schematic setup and use cases

5G-MoNArch final overall architecture; reference point representation with resilience & security (WP

Illustration of where the three dimensions of elasticity impact equipment in the network

Concept of data duplication (right) with multi-connectivity compared to a single connectivity approa

Hamburg Smart Sea Port testbed schematic setup and use cases

Stakeholder map used for the validation of socio-economic results