5G-MoNArch

Link to project website: https://www.5g-monarch.eu

Social Media: Twitter @5G_monarch

Contact: 5G-MoNArch-Contact@5g-ppp.eu

Objective

The expected diversity of services, use cases, and applications in 5G requires a flexible, adaptable, and programmable architecture. While this has been addressed in 5G-PPP Phase 1 at a conceptual level, it must be brought into practice in Phase 2, taking into account progress in Standards and providing experimental results.

In this regard, the main objectives of 5G-MoNArch are summarized below.

1. Detailed specification and extension of 5G architecture.
2. Extension of existing architecture design with key enabling innovations
   • Inter-slice control and cross-domain management
   • Experiment-driven modelling and optimization
   • Native cloud-enabled protocol stack
3. Functional innovations for the key technologies required for the identified use cases
   • Resilience and Security
   • Resource elasticity
4. Deployment and experimental implementation of the architecture in two use cases
   • Sea port use case
   • Touristic city use case
5. Evaluation, validation, and verification of the architecture performance

Achievements

5G-MoNArch brought the 5G mobile network architecture to the next step of evolution by fully integrating functions required for industrial, media & entertainment, and smart city use cases into the overall architecture.  Such integration of network functions renders the mobile network architecture usable in realistic applications.

The following technical concepts and features have been introduced to achieve this goal:

• New architecture: this includes a set of novel design aspects such as E2E slicing support across four network layers, slice-specific and slice-common functions, multi-tenancy capable management & orchestration, inter-slice resource management, and optional integration of RAN control applications. Furthermore, novel features were introduced including service-based characteristics spanning all layers with unified service-based interfaces, specific network slices blueprints and an analytics framework covering network, management and RAN analytics functions as a main driver towards full network automation. The overall architecture incorporates requirements, functions and interfaces for the resilience & security as well as resource elasticity functions.
• Resilience & security: particularly targeting industrial use cases with their strong requirements on reliable, resilient and secure network services, 5G-MoNArch developed concepts and functions pertaining to the following areas: RAN reliability, including data duplication solutions over multi-connectivity; telco cloud resilience deploying cognitive network functions for fault identification and correlation as well as robust network controllers and “5G islands”; security enhancements, including threat analysis and anomaly detection. The developed concepts were integrated with the overall architecture, thereby providing solutions that instantiate a network slice dedicated to resilient and secure services.
• Resource elasticity: further enhancing the flexibility of the virtualised and cloudified network a distribution- and orchestration-based solutions has been achieved. This was accomplished by introducing AI and analytics / machine learning-based functions such as elastic virtual network functions, allowing thus a graceful resource scaling for cloud resources. The derived solutions are shown to further increase the network resource efficiency, while allowing also for network self-dimensioning, and smart resource management.

To verify and validate, and to show the feasibility and applicability of the developed concepts in real environments, 5G-MoNArch built on two means: the project testbeds and the verification and validation framework:

• Testbeds: two testbeds were implemented: the Smart Sea Port testbed in Hamburg and the Touristic City testbed in Turin. Both testbed further contributed in particular to the verification of performance targets and served as baseline for the techno-economic validation.

o    Smart Sea Port testbed: addressing a set of industrial use cases this testbed showcased the applicability and functioning of E2E network slicing focusing on features including control and user plane separation, slice isolation, and service creation within minutes as well as high reliability, resilience and security services implemented in a large scale environment. The use cases cover mobile sensor connectivity (barges in the port), high reliable traffic management (connected traffic light) and mobile broadband augmented reality applications, each having its own slice but jointly using the same infrastructure.

o    Touristic City testbed: addressing a set of media & entertainment use cases this testbed showed the applicability and functioning of E2E network slicing focusing on features including 5G new radio interface, control and user plane separation and orchestration as well as resource elastic services implemented in a live environment with real end users, through the introduction of AI solutions.  The use case covers a virtual reality-based and interactive museum visit for visitors having a virtual remote tour guide, being very sensitive to latency and performance.

• Verification and validation: to quantify the technical and socio-economic benefits of the technologies developed in 5G-MoNArch a framework has been defined including a process as well as a set of technical and commercial / economic KPIs, which were evaluation along three evaluation cases defined within the work.

o    Technical verification: three sources were used, namely, the simulation results from the technical work packages, measurements from the testbeds, and a large-scale simulation-based approach which integrated the simulation results from the technical work packages into a common large scale scenario. As a result it could be shown that all performance targets defined by 5G-MoNArch or standards can be achieved by the developed concepts and architecture with only minor constraints regarding simultaneous achievement at all locations.

o    Techno-economic validation: the benefits of the implemented services together with trade-offs between investments and return on invest were studied along the three evaluation cases, including results from the testbeds, interviews with various stakeholders from within and beyond the scope of the use cases implemented in the testbeds, and by using dedicated business analysis toolsets. The resulting study (provided in deliverable 6.3) represents an important output of the project with respect to the goals of 5G-PPP Phase II projects.

Finally, the project has been very successful in terms of its dissemination and standardisation activities. With more than 80 publications from partners at international conferences and workshops as well as magazine and journals, the project was very visible in the overall research community. In total more than 100 contributions to 3GPP and ETSI standards have been submitted from the project work. The project had excellent visibility within the industrial community, attained through the testbeds and several very well attended dedicated events organised at their premises, but also the presence at MWC 2018 and 2019 as well as EuCNC and other events with own booths. It is further noted that 5G-MoNArch was crowned with the GSMA’s 2019 GLOMO for 5G Industrial Cooperation awarded to the partners of the Smart Sea Port testbed.

Project Participants: