Flex5Gware

Link to project website: Flex5Gware Project

Contact: Flex5Gware-Contact@5g-ppp.eu

Achievements

Motivation of the project:

Among the challenges that 5G mobile networks will face, the support of an anticipated 1000 fold mobile traffic increase over the next decade and the efficient handling of many different classes of traffic and services, representing quite diverse use cases, are the two most remarkable ones. To achieve these two ambitious goals a plethora of technological aspects need to be addressed. Among all these aspects, the Flex5Gware project has addressed the improvement of the performance and the reduction of the energy footprint of the HW and SW platforms, on top of which all communication-related functionalities are implemented and executed. It is also worth highlighting that performance improvements require progress not only in quantifiable/quantitative terms (e.g., operated bandwidth or simultaneous computational power enhancement and energy consumption reduction), but also in terms of other important non-functional aspects like scalability, modularity, and reconfigurability, which were also some of the key aspects addressed in Flex5Gware.

The technological progress in the development of the 5G mobile networks that has been derived from this project is especially a progress related to improvements on the HW and SW platforms. This has a direct benefit to the European society linked to the improvements in the quality of service, increased number of applications and services, and reduced cost of the future mobile networks. For example, 5G will facilitate a cost-effective access to a wide range of applications and services that support the citizens’ social wellbeing and social engagement, including a novel range of services like more efficient utility networks (energy, gas and water), traffic systems, health systems providing support of the elderly, as well as the further adoption of ICT services. Moreover, the improvements in energy efficiency of 5G platforms pointed out above can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and have a positive impact on climate change. Thanks to the cost efficiency of its HW and SW platforms, the expected ubiquitous coverage of 5G networks will provide similar opportunities for economical and societal progress to diverse regions ranging from densely populated areas to remote rural ones. Finally, the emergence of the 5G mobile networks will contribute to create new job posts and new companies in the communication networks domain and even to a bigger extent in secondary domains related to the application of ICT.

The Proofs of Concept developed in Flex5Gware:

In particular, Flex5Gware performed research to pin point specific implementation and prototyping challenges for key HW/SW building blocks in the form of eleven proofs-of-concept (PoC). In addition, the project partners addressed the ability of these PoCs to provide versatile, flexible, reconfigurable, efficient operations for 5G HW/SW platforms. Accordingly, most of the performance improvement achieved by Flex5Gware in terms of increased capacity, reduced energy footprint, as well as scalability and modularity stems from experimental results extracted directly from the Flex5Gware PoCs. Clearly, this is a significant step towards the validation of the practical viability of 5G HW/SW platforms in comparison to other approaches where performance fulfilment is obtained primarily via simulations or analytical results. As the following list will show, the eleven Flex5Gware PoCs covered the whole value chain of 5G platforms: starting from the antenna, RF modules and mixed signal stages and going up to digital HW and SW aspects. The list describes the 11 Flex5Gware PoCs that have been showcased in the Flex5Gware Final Event that took place at the TIM premises in Turin during May 21st – 22nd, 2017:

• Active SIW antennas with integrated power amplifiers for K/Ka frequency bands. In this PoC, an active Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) antenna with integrated power amplifier for operation in the 17-30 GHz frequency range was developed: the full-wave/circuit of the planar antenna and power amplifier are co-designed, which allows both cost reduction and performance improvement for 5G RF frontends.
• On-chip frequency generation. This PoC covered the full on-chip frequency generation system including transport of signals to receiving blocks. 5G frequency bands around 30 GHz as well as 60 GHz were considered. The main benefits of this development are cost, size, and power reduction while using state of the art CMOS technology allowing for high-level system integration.
• PAPR reduction and power amplifier pre-distortion. This PoC developed a new Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) reduction scheme named Weighted Selective Mapping (WSLM). The WSLM algorithm was implemented together with Digital Pre-Distortion (DPD) techniques to achieve a more efficient operation of 5G PAs.
• Multi-band transmitter. The multiband transceiver solution developed in Flex5Gware exploited broadband and multiband capabilities of components to realize transceiver chains, which covered simultaneously the 5G radio bands between 2.6 and 3.6 GHz for concurrent multiband operation. The developed transmit-chain allowed reducing the hardware complexity by decreasing the number of implemented transceivers.
• Multi-chain MIMO transmitter. This PoC demonstrated a feasible all-digital massive MIMO transmitter approach at small scale with 8 transmit branches, with an approach that would be easily scalable. The main progress of this approach was on its ability to generate an RF signal for a multi-chain transmitter in a single component together with an amplification method that was suitable for antenna arrays.
• Full duplex FBMC transceiver. This PoC demonstrated the practical feasibility of full duplex with possible new 5G waveforms taking Filter Bank Based Multi Carrier (FBMC) as an example. The proposed solution allowed the increase of cell capacity since one resource block was used at the same time for uplink and downlink, without stringent power consumption requirements on the UE.
• High-speed low power LDPC decoder. This PoC addressed the design of cost-effective Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) decoders. The expected benefits were to meet 5G requirements in terms of end-user data rates, while reducing power consumption at the UE side thanks to the reduced size of the implemented solution.
• HW/SW function split for energy aware communications. This PoC demonstrated how hardware-accelerated (HWA) and SW baseband and networking functions could be reconfigured, partitioning their operation across different nodes and performed an energy profiling of each partition. Different partitions were used to satisfy different requirements of energy efficiency.
• Reconfigurable and programmable radio platform and SW programming performed and injected by the network. This PoC demonstrated the whole adaptation loop of 5G technologies, by reconfiguring the radio behaviour according to advanced context estimates provided by sensing devices. This allowed, e.g., the configuration of device MAC rules for operating in relay-mode or direct access and switching across technologies according to the link quality.
• Flexible, scalable and reconfigurable small cell platform. This PoC built a flexible, scalable small cell platform endowed with multi-tenancy capabilities, while ensuring that 5G requirements were still met. This platform could be used to enable the possibility of multiple operators (or virtual Operators) sharing the same physical resource while still guaranteeing segregation.
• Flexible resource allocation in CRAN/vRAN platform. This PoC featured a small scale prototype of Virtual RAN, consisting of a group of eNBs and multiple LTE commercial terminal, where advanced CoMP techniques, dynamic Remote Radio Head (RRH) activation/deactivation and Baseband Unit (BBU) allocation and RRH association techniques were evaluated. As a result, inter-cell interference was reduced and the user-throughput has been increased.

Flex5Gware achievements and their market relevance:

All the progress achieved in these PoCs beyond the state-of-the-art will enable the evolution from current mobile networks to 5G. 5G networks will open new markets and opportunities to network operators, developers of communication subsystems, device designers and providers, system integrators, ICT solution providers and user terminal developers. In particular, regarding the socio-economic impact, Flex5Gware is giving the European industry the opportunity to go into new markets and increase its revenue by reaching a larger number of customers (and M2M subscriptions). For industries this is a great opportunity that would be difficult to achieve with an individual approach and without this collaborative project. In addition, the knowledge acquired so far and the developed technologies will contribute to allow the European industries to create new product lines targeting 2020. This fact will contribute to the industries growth and will additionally improve their competitiveness and increase their added value. Moreover, the advances and outcomes achieved so far are increasing the State of the Art (SotA) technology level of Flex5Gware partners. Reaching a higher SotA level will open the door to achieve more competitive companies with a higher potential. Finally, the energy efficiency achieved by the project’s solutions obtained so far can have a positive impact of energy cost, thus reducing OPEX, both in ICT and in other technology sectors.

Flex5Gware Dissemination results:

As a short summary of the dissemination achievements of Flex5Gware, it is important to highlight that the outcomes of the project have been published in

• 15 contributions to standardization bodies
• 24 contributions in book chapters/journals/whitepapers and
• 38 papers in conference/workshop proceedings

It is also worth pointing out that important dissemination activities of the Flex5Gware project were also channeled through the participation in joint 5G PPP-organized/supported activities. Finally, regarding dissemination activities related to major events on the topic of 5G systems, Flex5Gware researchers participated in 5 public exhibitions and demonstrations (e.g., there was a Flex5Gware at the 2nd Global 5G event in Rome) and co-organized 8 workshops in prestigious international conferences (like the 2nd International Workshop on 5G RAN Design that took place alongside the Globecom 2016 conference).

Summary:

From all that has been said above Flex5Gware’s research and innovation activities will have positive effects with respect to the creation of know-how, the anchorage of a skilled work force, the strengthening of the competitiveness and of growth of companies, as well as the creation of jobs not only in ICT but also in other technology areas (e.g. energy, water, gas, transport, health, etc.). In addition, new business opportunities for SMEs to increase their growth by developing new products and services are expected to appear within the context of the Flex5Gware activities and Flex5Gware also introduces an excellent business opportunity for the European mobile operators, due to the new and improved services that they will be able to offer to their customers.

Project Participants:

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