5G CITY

Link to project website: http://www.5gcity.eu

Social media: Twitter@5GCity 

Contact: 5GCity-Contact@5g-ppp.eu

Objective

The ultimate goal of 5GCity is to maximize the return on investment for the whole digital market chain (users, application, cloud providers, i.e., the municipalities themselves, telecom providers, and infrastructure providers). To do so, 5GCity’s main aim is to build and deploy a common, multi-tenant, open platform that extends the (centralized) cloud model to the extreme edge of the network, with a demonstration in three different cities (Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca), and thus advance the state of the art to solve the main open research challenges in the 5G-based edge virtualization domain, including the neutral host perspective in dense deployment environments such as cities. Thus, 5GCity will design, develop, deploy and demonstrate, in operational conditions, a distributed cloud and radio platform for municipalities and infrastructure owners acting as 5G neutral hosts.

Achievements

1. Use Cases definition and requirement Analysis for three main scenarios of 5GCity as well as the descriptions of the six Use Cases selected as pilots for the 5G infrastructures of Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca for the preliminary aspects of the architecture, the classification and grouping of the overall requirements and KPIs, identifying all involved stakeholders and actors with their interests in the context of 5GCity.

Publications – “5GCity: A novel 5G-enabled architecture for ultra-high definition and immersive media on city infrastructure”, C. Colman-Meixner, P. Diogo, M. S. Siddiqui, A. Albanese, H. Khalili, A. Mavromatis, L. Vignaroli, A. Ulisses, J. Colom, R. Nejabati and D. Simeonidou – IEEE Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB), June 2018 – Added to IEEE Xplore: 16 August 2018; Electronic ISSN: 2155-5052; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/BMSB.2018.8436813

2. The 5GCity Architecture provides the details of the design, at system-level, of 5GCity virtualization, service and orchestration and control platform implemented during the project as well as the description of the interfaces and workflows of 5GCity platform. The design of the high-level architecture, guarantees the coexistence of the Use Cases deployment in the same architectural framework, considering the 5GCity three-tier domains, data centers, MEC nodes and small cells/Wi-Fi APs, of the three cities involved in the project.

Publications – “Deploying a Novel 5G-Enabled Architecture on City Infrastructure for Ultra-High Definition and Immersive Media Production and Broadcasting”, C. Colman Meixner, M. S. Siddiqui, K. Antoniou, H. Khalili, A. Albanese, L. Vignaroli, P. Cruschelli, G. Carrozzo, S. Figuerola, A. Papageorgiou, I. Neokosmodis, D. Pujals, R. Spada, A. Garcia, A. Ulisses, P. Santos, J. Colom, R. Nejabati, and D. Simeonidou – IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (Volume: 65, Issue: 2, June 2019) – INSPEC Accession Number: 18734807; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TBC.2019.2901387

3. One of the most important results of 5GCity project is the business model definition, based on the Neutral host concept, enabled by the adoption of 5GCity architecture and platform as well as solutions towards business relationships between cities and telecom operators involving also vertical application providers. A complete business model describes for the Use Cases defined in 5GCity, evaluating the techno-economic aspects to assess their economic feasibility. Furthermore, it includes an analysis aiming at monitoring the regulatory elements and the evolutions around 5G to avoid the regulations become a blocking point for the 5GCity wide adoption.

Publications – “Are 5G Networks and the Neutral Host Model the Solution to the Shrinking Telecom Market”. Neokosmidis I. et al. (2018). In: Iliadis L., Maglogiannis I., Plagianakos V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations. AIAI 2018. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 520. Springer.

4. Design of the 5G compute and network virtualization architecture for smart cities edge neutral host infrastructures.

Publications – Paolino, Michele, et al. “Compute and network virtualisation at the edge for 5G smart cities neutral host infrastructures.” 2019 IEEE 2nd 5G World Forum (5GWF). IEEE., https://doi.org/10.1109/5GWF.2019.8911726

5. Development of a RAN controller that is capable of configuring and managing Wi-Fi APs and Small Cells. The RAN controller integrates fully with the 5GCITY platform and exposes an interface to manage radio chunks (radio hardware settings) and radio services (vAPs / PLMNIDs).

Publications – J. J. Aleixendri, A. Betzler and D. Camps-Mur, “A practical approach to slicing Wi-Fi RANs in future 5G networks,” 2019 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), Marrakesh, Morocco, 2019, pp. 1-6. DOI: 10.1109/WCNC.2019.8885777

6. Development of a Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) specific for the edge devices and focusing on security and trusted computing extensions to secure the neutral host compute nodes. A video demonstrating the virtualization platform can be found at the official YouTube channel of the project.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqakofF2vjTdyEihpadfvLQ/videos

Patents – US10127071B2, Virtual switch for multi-compartment mixed critical network communications.

Publications – Sechkova, Teodora, Enrico Barberis, and Michele Paolino. “Secure location-aware VM deployment on the edge through OpenStack and ARM TrustZone.” 2019 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC). IEEE, 2019. 10.1109/EuCNC.2019.8801997

Publications – Sechkova, Teodora, Enrico Barberis, and Michele Paolino. “Cloud & edge trusted virtualized infrastructure manager (vim)-security and trust in openstack.” 2019 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Workshop (WCNCW). IEEE, 2019.10.1109/WCNCW.2019.8902624

7. Development of an open-source solution for able to build unikernels targeted at specific applications without requiring the time-consuming, expert work.

Link: https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/unikraft/

8. Development of a neutral host platform, namely a platform which facilitates the sharing of 5G infrastructure among different network service providers (telecom operators or vertical industries), by leveraging new network virtualization solutions and dynamic configuration enabled by 5G technologies. It is focused around a scalable multi-tier orchestrator, integrated with a slice manager, a Dashboard, an integrated SDK for service creation, and other components, integrating state-of-the-art controllers and other open-source software (such as OpenSourceMano, OpenStack etc.)

The links to 5GCity Neutral Hosting Platform software repositories, release notes, and installation instructions can be found at: https://www.5gcity.eu/software-5gcity/

Publications – M. Puig Mena, A. Papageorgiou, L. Ochoa-Aday, S. Siddiqui and G. Baldoni, “Enhancing the performance of 5G slicing operations via multi-tier orchestration”, 23rd Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks and Workshops (ICIN), 2020, Accepted for publication.

Publications – A. Papageorgiou, A. Fernández-Fernández, S. Siddiqui, and G. Carrozzo. “On 5G network slice modelling: Service-, resource-, or deployment-driven?” Computer Communications 149 (2020): 232-240.

Publications – H. Khalili, A. Papageorgiou, S. Siddiqui, C. Colman-Meixner, G. Carrozzo, R. Nejabati, and D. Simeonidou. “Network Slicing-aware NFV Orchestration for 5G Service Platforms.” In 2019 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), pp. 25-30. IEEE, 2019.

Publications – G. Baldoni, P. Cruschelli, M. Paolino, C. Colman Meixner, A. Albanese, A. Papageorgiou, H. Khalili, S. Siddiqui, and D. Simeonidou. “Edge Computing Enhancements in an NFV-based Ecosystem for 5G Neutral Hosts.” In 2018 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), pp. 1-5. IEEE, 2018

Publications – A. Papageorgiou, A. Fernández-Fernández, L. Ochoa-Aday, M. Silva Peláez, M. S. Siddiqui. “SLA Management Procedures in 5G Slicing-based Systems.” In 2020 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC). IEEE, 2020.

Videos covering the 5GCity NH platform demos can be found on the official YouTube channel of the project.

(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqakofF2vjTdyEihpadfvLQ/videos)

9. Investigation of machine learning solutions which can enhance 5G neutral host platforms, along with development and evaluation of a solution for distributing the computations of neural networks efficiently in such distributed systems.
10. Design a 5G enabled city-wide testbed infrastructure for the cities of Barcelona, Bristol, and Lucca to deploy and demonstrate Neutral Host model and Media Use Cases. The designed infrastructure follows a three-tier architecture of Radio Access Network (RAN), Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) node, and Metropolitan node.  The 5GCity testbed infrastructure a Metropolitan node (Tier 3) hosting the 5GCity platform, connected to one or more Edge Computing (MEC) nodes (Tier 2) serving multiple RAN devices (Tier1), i.e., LTE Small Cells and Wi-Fi Access Point connecting Mobile Devices.

Publications – C. Colman-Meixner, P. Diogo, M. S. Siddiqui, A. Albanese, H. Khalili, A. Mavromatis, L. Vignaroli, A. Ulisses, J. Colom, R. Nejabati and D. Simeonidou, “5GCity: A novel 5G-enabled architecture for ultra-high definition and immersive media on city infrastructure”, – IEEE Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB), June 2018 – DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/BMSB.2018.8436813

11. Deployment of the designed 5G enabled testbed in Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca by conducting integration tests and measurements.

Videos covering the 5GCity deployments in the three cities can be found on the official YouTube channel of the project.

(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqakofF2vjTdyEihpadfvLQ/videos)

Publications – C. Colman Meixner, M. S. Siddiqui, K. Antoniou, H. Khalili, A. Albanese, L. Vignaroli, P. Cruschelli, G. Carrozzo, S. Figuerola, A. Papageorgiou, I. Neokosmodis, D. Pujals, R. Spada, A. Garcia, A. Ulisses, P. Santos, J. Colom, R. Nejabati, and D. Simeonidou, “Deploying a Novel 5G-Enabled Architecture on City Infrastructure for Ultra-High Definition and Immersive Media Production and Broadcasting”,- IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (Volume: 65, Issue: 2, June 2019) – INSPEC Accession Number: 18734807; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TBC.2019.2901387

Publications – M. Paolino, G. Carrozzo, A. Betzler, C.Colman-Meixner, H. Khalili, S. Siddiqui, T. Sechkova, and D. Simeonidou, “Compute and network virtualisation at the edge for 5G smart cities neutral host infrastructures”,  IEEE 5GWF’19: Workshop on 5G Applications and Services: Current Trends, Key Drivers, Challenges and Standardization Imperatives, Dresden, Germany, Noviembre 2019.

12. Validation of the 5G-Enabled Testbeds and Use Cases along with their corresponding KPIs.

Videos covering all 5GCity Use Cases and their validation in Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca can be found on the official YouTube channel of the project.

(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqakofF2vjTdyEihpadfvLQ/videos)

Publications – Gino Carrozzo and M. Shuaib Siddiqui, “Path to 5G Smart Cities: Experiences from Media and Public Safety Pilots in 5GCity”, 8th European Conference on Networks and Communications (EUCNC 2019), Special Session 3 5G trials for vertical industries, Valencia, Spain, June 18-21, 2019.

Publications – Xuan Du, Gino Carrozzo, Bessem Sayadi, Fotis Lazarakis, M.S. Siddiqui, Oscar Carrasco, Michail Alexandros Kourtis, Janez Sterle, and Roberto Bruschi, “Definition and Evaluation of Latency in 5G with Heterogeneous Use Cases and Architectures”, 8th European Conference on Networks and Communications (EUCNC 2019), Special Session 3 5G trials for vertical industries, Valencia, Spain, June 18-21, 2019

Project Participants: