Prototyping the future of 5G Communications

Every year the number of wireless enabled devices and continues to grow at an exponential rate. As these devices create and consume growing amounts of data, the wireless communications infrastructure that connects these devices must evolve to support the demand NI is providing tools and technologies for prototyping and defining this new frontier for wireless communications.

A multitude of novel use cases are foreseen for 5G wireless systems and in this context, an equally large number of requirements have emerged. National Instruments is committed to provide researchers with prototyping platforms that facilitate the early assessment of performance trade-offs of new algorithms and technologies in practical environments.

Three particularly interesting aspects are demonstrated:

1. A rapidly expanding mmWave prototyping solution for the highest radio frequency band in practical use today.
2. A real-time implementation of 4G LTE as a starting point for 5G physical layer prototyping.
3. A real-time prototyping and simulation platform for endto- end 5G wireless networks.

For more than 80 years,Rohde & Schwarz has stood for quality, precision and innovation in all fields of wireless communications. The privately owned company is strategically based on five pillars: test and measurement,broadcast and media,secure communications, cybersecurity, radiomonitoring and radiolocation. The electronics group, headquartered in Munich(Germany), has a global presence and is among the world market leaders in all of its business fields.

NetIDE – Controller Independence supporting composed SDN Applications

The current SDN (Software-defined Networking) landscape is extremely fragmented. Different open and closed source controller frameworks eg, OpenDaylight, Ryu, Floodlight or ONOS exist. Porting SDN applications between platforms is time-consuming requiring significant effort. This is especially true in upcoming SDN/NFV-enabled 5G systems where network segments will be supported by different SDN controllers. Consequently, SDN users (e.g. mobile operators) face the danger of vendor/platform lock-in, confined to applications working for the platform of choice, or forced to re-implement their solutions when they choose a new platform. NetIDE provides an interesting approach for network operators to explore application-centricity and application-nativeness for future 5G network deployments.

The main objective is to demonstrate the mature technologies developed in NetIDE. The NetIDE’s Development Environment allows application/network developers to design the network topology and to build network applications through composition of multiple modules.

Once deployed onto the NetIDE Network Engine, modules implemented for different controller frameworks (ODL, RYU, Floodlight) cooperate as a single SDN application controlling the network.

The network application can even be updated at runtime by adding new modules and by dynamically reloading the composition specification.

Demo: The NetIDE demonstration consists of four main parts:

• Demonstration of the NetIDE Development Environment and its capabilities to build network applications
• Demonstration of the capabilities of the NetIDE Network Engine
• Demonstration of runtime tuning of the network applications by stopping/starting/adding modules and reloading the composition specification
• Demonstration of the NetIDE debugging toolset implanted for testing and profiling the network application.

METIS-II 5G Visualisation

In the demo we will show the current status of the visualization platform based on Unity 3D as well as a few examples of technologies developed in the project, together with an overall presentation of the project. The use of the UNITY 3D tool will be used for a simplified simulation of the technology components developed in METIS-II and other 5G-PPP research projects allowing the person operating the tool for real time interaction with simulated environment.

Exploiting Lossy Links in 5G Communications

The constant increase in the number of devices as well as the exponential growth in the exchanged data volumes make the future networks highly dense in terms of number of nodes and conveyed traffic. In a wireless environment, this density challenges today’s wireless communication techniques and protocols and calls for new interference mitigation strategies. A major requirement for 5G becomes offering robust, efficient and low latency information transfer over such dynamic and complex networks. We aim to influence with our solution 5G researchers and stakeholders and impact future wireless standards mainly 5G and IEEE802.11x.

Demo:  We propose to demonstrate our new communication paradigm called Links on the fly (LOTF) which is based on distributed joint source channel coding, lossy forwarding relaying and advanced network protocols, through an integrated and fully operational proof of concept. Our demo aims to highlight how LOTF enables communication over lossy links in a set of scenarios and configurations where communication with state of the art solutions is deemed impossible. It is our target to convince 5G stakeholders and influence future wireless standards.

Our demo will highlight the feasibility of the new LOTF concept based on a practical testbed consisting of up to 4 ETTUS USRP radio devices and the open software platform GNU Radio. On top of these devices, we will run our designed PHY and MAC layers protocols. The results will be displayed in an intuitive and easy to understand manner through a picture transmission whereby speed and quality of the arriving pictures illustrate the performance gain of our solution compared to baseline concept. The demo will be interactive and intuitive. Surrounding 3-4 posters and a video detailing in an accessible way the LOTF concept and its practical validation.

Multimedia Annotated Content in Multi-Screen Environments

The technologies to be adopted and demonstrated, either explicitly or implicitly, include:

• Multimedia content analysis and automatic annotation
• Editorial process and tool aiming at providing both content and semantic enrichments
• Multiscreen technology and toolkit, providing a rapid prototyping environment for multiscreen client applications in a device and platform independent manner
• Personalization, relevance feedback and social recommendation in order to improve user’s (viewer’s) Quality of Experience.

Use cases and exploitation applies to both business-to-customer (b2c) and business-to-business (b2b) applications.

Demonstrate the operation of a combined toolkit with the following features:

• Enabling the Automatic Annotation and Editorial Process during the creation, production and postproduction of multimedia content.
• Providing Search and Retrieval Mechanisms for existing enriched multimedia content that could be used as building blocks of a fast innovative creative process.
• Pairing Created Metadata with Multimedia Content enabling interactivity through clickable video and access to relevant educational and recreational content.
• Delivering a Multi-screen Tool enabling automatic porting to different target platforms, such as regular web pages, mobile pages and mobile apps as wells as TV applications.
• Exploit Relevance Feedback, Personalization and Social Recommendation Mechanisms, allowing targeted advertising.

Demo: We will demonstrate a toolkit where multimedia content after creation, is enriched and expanded with content allowing playback in multi-screen environments, as well as providing access to enriched content and relevant online material. Focus will be placed on Content and context- Aware Second Screen Advertising experiences delivered to users. Exploiting the annotated multimedia content that users are currently watching, and driven by the social recommendation and personalization tool the media delivery platform can identify and provide the most relevant advertisement content, ensuring campaigns optimization. We will demonstrate the operation of Multimedia Content Annotations for Rapid Exploitation in Multi-Screen Environments toolkit that consists of the following key components/tools: a) the automatic annotation and editorial tool, b) the multi-screen tool and c) the social and personalization tool. User(s) can search for a specific video and during the display, they are presented with personalized advertisements. Multiscreen environment is used for displaying (or single screen may be split into the following areas): i) Recommended Videos; Section which presents videos similar to the one they are currently watching (based on social recommendation and personalization tool); ii) Side Advertisements; Modules that display offerings linked to the selected video (based on proper tagging).

Advanced Dynamic Spectrum 5G mobile networks Employing Licensed shared access (ADEL): Proof-of-concept Demonstrations

Licensed Shared Access has been proposed in order to enable the shared use of frequency resources allocated to an Incumbent Operator by one or more Licensee Operators. LSA promises to relieve the spectrum crunch experienced by the wireless communications industry. FP7 project ADEL is at the forefront of LSA research, having developed an end-to-end architecture as well as novel collaborative sensing, cooperative communication, and resource allocation protocols to extend LSA beyond today’s state-of-the-art spectrum sharing practice.

Demo: This demo will serve as proof-of-concept of FP7 ADEL project’s approach to Licensed Shared Access (LSA). ADEL advocates LSA that is dynamic, allows homogeneous types of service by the incumbent and licensee operators and even spectrum co-existence between them. The demo will focus on the following key items:

1. Over-the-air demonstration of collaborative sensing and spectrum co-existence
   This part of the demo, contributed by Athens Information Technology (AIT) will consist of two phases: in Phase 1), two Licensee access points, each equipped with a 6-sector antenna array, will perform collaborative sensing in order to detect the presence of incumbent activity. The spatial dimension enabled by the employed parasitic antenna arrays will allow much improved detection probability and reduced false alarm rate. In Phase 2), both incumbent and licensee transmissions will take care simultaneously by dynamic spectrum allocation based on the sensing achieved in Phase 1). The demo will show how spectrum can be shared dynamically in a way that provides good QoS to both incumbent and licensee operators by use of these technology components (antenna array-assisted collaborative sensing and spectrum allocation).
2. Reciprocity attainment in TDD MIMO systems for reduced channel sharing requirements
   This part of the demo, contributed by Institut Eurecom, aims at achieving good channel reciprocity in MIMO time-division duplexing (TDD) systems. Channel reciprocity is important in order to drastically reduce the sharing of channel information needed between multiple cooperating nodes is spectrum-coexistence networks, such as the LSA networks studied in ADEL. However, the Tx and Rx radio frequency (RF) frontends in transceivers are usually not symmetric, which breaks the channel reciprocity seen from the digital processing domain. Calibration is thus needed to compensate this hardware non-symmetry, so that the base station can assess CSIT from UL channel estimation. This demo will showcase techniques of calibrating hardware non-symmetry internally at the base station for a MIMO system. We will illustrate that the beamforming performance based on the proposed calibration method greatly outperforms the case where calibration is not used, and can almost achieve the performance when ideal CSIT is known.
3. System-level demonstration of spectrum management in LSA networks
   The final part of the ADEL demo includes a video to introduce the viewer to the concept of Licenced Spectrum Access (LSA) within the ADEL context and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to show the results and findings on LSA. The GUI is based on an off-line presentation illustrating the main contributions of ADEL to spectrum management for MNOs on LSA bands.

Keysight’s 5G solutions - Evolution. Revolution.Reality

The development of 5G depends on up-to-date tools that let designers easily explore new signals, scenarios and topologies. Keysight’s 5G solutions are ready to enable deeper insights as development evolves with the standard. In design and test, Keysight is enabling industry leaders to innovate across new and existing technologies as they transform ideas into reality.

COST - European Cooperation in Science and Technology

To promote COST and to illustrate how the large scale interdisciplinary networking of researchers across Europe (and beyond) and systematic knowledge sharing, can give a strong impetus to the development of ideas and strategies with respect to Information and Communication Technologies in general and, particularly to the conference topics such as: network technologies, spectrum sharing, etc... We plan to demonstrate the added value of bottom-up, open research initiatives through the presentation of several COST Actions as well as the disseminated information.

Demo: At the COST Booth, you will learn that COST Actions are:

• bottom-up science and technology networks
• open to researchers and stakeholders
• with a duration of four years
• active through a range of networking tools (workshops,conferences, training schools, short-term scientific missions (STSMs) and dissemination activities)

Embedded and Cloud-based software for smarter (reactive, predictive, cognitive) Smart Systems for Water Monitoring

The size and diversity of the networks requires availability of sensors in large number, while a very strong constraint on the final cost of water requires that the cost for monitoring means is relatively low. At the same time, due to dynamics in water networks, they should be able to evolve, while in use if possible. To that respect, long-term management of water resources requires widespread, low-cost monitoring means with highly differentiated requirements and adaptive capabilities.

In the context of Proteus project, WINGS is developing software (embedded and non-embedded), which comes to offer on the one hand, the required adaptability that enables a single device architecture to support several, highly differentiated applicative goals related to water network monitoring, and on the other hand, the cognitive capabilities that manage evolving contexts and requirements during exploitation even in a predictive manner.

Demo: The scope of this demo is to present the Software Integrated Prototype developed by WINGS. We introduce the hardware platform used for the prototyping of the smart system and we present the demonstration and testing scenarios targeting the innovations listed below:

• To enable reactive capabilities in the smart system.
• To enable predictive capabilities in the smart system.

5G-PPP CHARISMA Project

CHARISMA’s objective is the development of an open access, converged 5G network, via virtualised slicing of network resources to different service providers (SPs), with network intelligence distributed out towards end-users over a self-similar hierarchical architecture. Such an approach offers a means to achieve important 5G key performance indicators (KPIs) related to low latency, high and scalable bandwidths, energy efficiency and virtualised security (v-security). CHARISMA integrates such diverse technologies into a single architecture with SDN and NFV advancements.

Demo: Three demos will be performed:

• Demo1: Showcase of multi-tenancy in open access networks;
• Demo2: Demonstration of an end-to-end security management automation mechanism for 5G networks;
• Demo3: Development of physical access technologies for low latency video caching application.

Demo1 will show an open access scenario with network slicing isolation, multi-tenancy functionalities and an active node at the Optical Line Termination (OLT) for distributed computing; Demo2 will present the detection and neutralization of a DDoS attack performed against a 5G network targeting an end-user application running over virtualized computing infrastructure. Demo 3 will demonstrate a video caching use case with low latency physical layer implementation based on 60Ghz wireless and GbE through various CHARISMA Aggregation Level’s with their local intelligence and data processing functionalities.

SOLDER - Spectrum OverLay through aggregation of heterogeneous DispERsed Bands

The goal of SOLDER is to develop technology and systems, which will provide the efficient aggregation of non-continuous dispersed spectrum bands licensed to heterogeneous networks (HetNets) and heterogeneous Radio Access Technology (h-RATs).

Several proof-of-concepts are being developed in the SOLDER project. In this demo we will present the new features of OpenAirInterface, that make it simpler than ever to use it for LTE-compliant spectrum-agile experimentation. These include the implementation of the Release 10 carrier aggregation features as well as an API that lets users implement their own scheduling algorithms and plug them directly into OpenAirInterface.

Demo: OpenAirInterface (OAI) provides an open-source standard-compliant implementation of LTE Release 10 for UE, eNB, MME, HSS, SGw and PGw on standard Linux-based computing equipment (Intel x86 PC/ARM architectures) that can be used in conjunction with off-the-shelf SDR platforms such as USRP, Blade RF, Sodera, and ExpressMIMO2. The platform can be used for real-time experimentation and is interoperable with commercial equipment. The demonstration will showcase the carrier aggregation features of OAI together with a test UE from Sequans.

5G-NORMA HW- and SW-based demos

Current centralized mobile network solutions have been designed with a network architecture which is static and fixed in nature. However such a static network design is not future-proof since increasing demands for high throughput and low latency can only be catered properly with a more flexible design approach. Such flexible network architecture should allow fast and easy reconfiguration to meet the future 5G service requirements (e.g. E2E network latency of a few ms). In order to enable this kind of flexibility and service-aware functionalities, a new network architecture design and innovative and novel concepts need to be developed.

Demo: There are two different demos, so the objective is twofold:

1. To represent the performance of a flexible and service-dependent radio access network (RAN) as one of the key innovations of 5G NORMA project. The radio resource management (RRM) functionality will be placed in different network locations taking into account the user service requirements and network characteristics. Additionally, the (de-)centralized radio resource management algorithm will optimally adapt the user resource utilization on the traffic load fluctuations and inter-cell interference conditions.
2. To show the E2E latency impact of function decomposition and relocation moving the network functions closest to the end users. Current EPC components will be moved into the eNB baseband board, enabling local traffic routing.

There are two different demos, namely a SW-based demo and a HW-based demo:

The SW-based demo deals with multi-service and context-aware scheduling. Using a network simulator, we simulate two different services, i.e. HD-video streaming traffic for pedestrians and car-to-car communication via infrastructure (V2X). We demonstrate that by re-locating the RRM unit to a central cloud, the throughput for HD-video users will be improved due to the interference mitigation using a centralized coordinated scheduling, whereas on the other hand for autonomous driving service shifting the mobile network functions to the network edge improves the end-to-end latency as the key service requirements for such a time-critical service.

A video will show the HW-based demo, where a scale model rally car is driven using a commercial tablet as the steer, both connected to the LTE eNB, in two different situations. In the first one the EPC routing components (S-GW) are moved into the eNB baseband board. This solution guarantees the lowest latency possible with this HW setup and the video shows that it’s possible to drive remotely the car with a very good control feeling. The second situation mimics a commercially deployed LTE network, in which an average e2e latency of hundreds of ms is experienced. The driving experience is very bad due by the great delay between the command and the response of the model car.

MiWaveS : 5G Heterogeneous Networks with mmWave small-cell access and backhaul

The booth will present the activities carried out in the project MiWaveS (www.miwaves.eu) on millimeter-wave technologies for access and backhaul communications in 5G wireless mobile networks. MiWaveS is currently the largest European project focused on mm-wave technologies for 5G, an area attracting many interests nowadays in Europe as well as US and Asia. The project is in its final year (01/2014-12/2016) and we will be able to present significant results obtained on HetNet design and mm-Wave wireless technologies at 60 GHz and 71-86 GHz for high-data rate access and backhaul.

The objective is to communicate on the activities carried out in MiWaveS and present the results obtained to date as well as the demonstrations planned by the end of the project on the implementation of mm-wave wireless access and backhaul links using 60-GHz and 71-86 GHz radios and antennas developed by the partners. If other EU projects involved in mm-waves, like mmMAGIC, MiWEBA and E3Network, organize their own booth, there would be an interest to have them adjacent to ours in order to highlight the complementarity of these projects and the involvement of the EC in this field.

Demo:We plan to exhibit hardware prototypes of mmWave radio transceivers and antennas operating at 60 GHz and 71-76 GHz as well as live videos of demonstrations of high throughput wireless access and backhaul links in these frequency bands. Posters and brochures will support the material exhibited in the booth.

NOKIA will present demos showing the evolution to telco cloud and 5G architecture:

• Shared Data Layer optimizes cloud architecture to realize full benefits of telco cloud
• 5G industrial automation/cooperative robots

iKaaS (Intelligent Knowledge as a Service)

The success of the IoT world requires service provision attributed with ubiquity, reliability, high-performance, efficiency, scalability. Towards this goal, iKaaS merges IoT with Cloud Computing concepts by combining global and local clouds, security gateways, communication interfaces, storage units and applications for the realization of an intelligent Knowledge-as-a-Service platform. The introduction of cognition was the first step for the IoT success, as it brought essential self-management/ awareness. iKaaS aims to proceed to the next vital step for the IoT success and for new business value propositions for the IoT world combined with cloud principles.

iKaaS develops an intelligent, privacy preserving and secure Big Data resource and analytics engine built atop a multi-cloud infrastructure that will be fed with large scale ubiquitous data collected from heterogeneous sensing networks and data sources. The objective of the demo is to showcase through the pilots and applications focusing on smart city and smart health aspects, the power of the iKaaS platform, in terms of combining Local and Global Clouds to provide optimal service deployment, smart virtual object as a service and Knowledge as a Service for building innovative, cross-border, situation-aware applications.

Demo: Aspects of iKaaS pilots will be showcased: i) environmental health in Madrid; ii) town management in Tago - Nishi. Demonstrated applications include: i) a town management application, which is provided by using virtual reality technology and head-mounted display to enhance the user experience in immersive environment; (ii) an assisted living application where the iKaaS platform is exploited for services to improve the quality of life of elderly/disabled individuals. The security gateway concept will be showcased, providing access control to each local cloud while interpreting the differences in regulations between countries.

NFaaS in terrestrial and satellite networks

T-NOVA: NFV is creating new opportunities for software companies to enter the networking market. T-NOVA introduces a novel NFV Marketplace, focused on lowering entry barriers to the telecom market for developers and SMEs, who will use T NOVA to offer innovative virtual network appliances, and to monetize their offerings. T-NOVA also provides a common intersection point between developers and telecom operators, leading to more performant networks and reducing time-to market for innovative services. VITAL: The combination of Terrestrial and Satellite networks by bringing Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) into the satellite domain and by enabling Software-Defined-Networking (SDN)- based paves way for a unified control plane that would allow operators to efficiently manage and optimize the operation of hybrid SatCom-Terrestrial networks.

Demo:With respect to T-NOVA demo, the objective is to demonstrate the concept of Network Function as-a-Service (NFaaS) implemented by T-NOVA. The demo will demonstrate the VNF offerings via the Marketplace, the composition of NS and finally the provision and deployment and operation of an example Network Service over the T-NOVA Pilot infrastructure. With respect to VITAL demo, the objective is to enable NFV into SatCom domain, which will provide the operators with appropriate tools and interfaces in order to establish end-toend fully operable virtualised satellite networks to be offered to third-party operators/service providers. The demo focuses on developing around three key application scenarios: Satellite Virtual Network Operator (SVNO) services, Satellite backhauling and hybrid telecom service delivery.

The T-NOVA demo will showcase:

1. T-NOVA NFV Orchestrator (TeNOR) base components: utilizing the Orchestrator GUI to instantiate, deploy, and monitor different NFV services.
2. T-NOVA stakeholder interaction with the Marketplace: User registration, administration, VNF and service composition, SLA template creation, VNF acquisition and trading
3. Platform-Aware VNF Deployment: Exploiting the VNF requirements to identify the appropriate platform-specific resources for its deployment.

The VITAL demo will showcase:

1. VITAL NFV Manager: utilizing the VITAL manager GUI to instantiate, deploy, and monitor different NFV services.
2. Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE): Demonstrating the NFV and SDN support at a whitebox located at the customer premises, allowing the execution of value added services at the edge of the network.
3. Emulated satellite demos, showing the SDN-applicability at hybrid satellite and terrestrial architectures.

River Publishers is active in many areas of Science and Technology, such as Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Materials Science, Optics and Photonics, Biomedical Engineering, Nano Science and Science Education, and we publish peer reviewed research books, proceedings and journals in all these areas. River Publishers works with internationally established authors and editors, and we interact with them in a personal and professional manner so as to ensure high quality publications. This is reflected in the fact that all our books published after 2010 are indexed in the Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index.

Quality of Service Provision and Capacity Expansion through Extended-DSA for 5G

The main objective of SPEED-5G is to achieve a significantly better exploitation of heterogeneous wireless technologies, providing higher capacity together with the ultra-densification of cellular technology, and effectively supporting the new 5G Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements.

Demo: The demo booth aims to promote the project’s concept and show to the conference attendants a first impact of flexible RRM and MAC solutions that are being proposed by SPEED-5G. It is important to have SPEED-5G representation in a EC-supported event, in order to show the ongoing work and project’s benefits.

Software demonstration for flexible RRM and MAC solutions in 5G environments.

Federation of testbeds for Future Internet research and experimentation

The Fed4FIRE has been successful at federating a multitude of testbeds in Europe and world-wide, ensuring simple and remote access to one or more testbeds for various types of experiments. Besides the demonstrations on easy usage of the federated testbeds, the booth presentation will also focus on how experiments and other projects leverage on Fed4FIRE. For this, a selection of experiments implemented in the Fed4FIRE federation will be presented through digital posters and through live demos it will be shown how different projects, such as F-Interop (interop tests for IoT), eWINE/WISHFUL (wireless networking experimentation), and FORGE (online learning platform using testbeds), leverage on using the Fed4FIRE tools and testbeds.

A multitude of novel use cases are foreseen for 5G wireless systems and in this context, an equally large number of requirements have emerged. National Instruments is committed to provide researchers with prototyping platforms that facilitate the early assessment of performance trade-offs of new algorithms and technologies in practical environments.

WiSHFUL – Heterogeneous wireless networking experimentation anywhere

1. Many wireless test facilities exist, but are generally located in fixed physical environments, each with their own characteristic propagation properties and unique interference conditions. This often limits the validity of results, as the target environment in which a wireless solution will eventually be deployed may be very different from the fixed physical environments where the solution has been developed and evaluated through experimentation.

2. Widely available “off-the-shelf” hardware and software is not flexible, because radio drivers are closed and only expose limited functionality. Documentation of interfaces is generally very limited or even lacking. Even a minor tweak or adaptation may require huge effort and cost.

3. Software Defined Radio devices are more flexible, but often lack high-level specification and programming tools. SDR research mainly focuses on PHY layer development. Higher layer protocols (in particular medium access control) generally exhibit low performance in terms of time control, limiting research directions where low transmission latency is required.

The main objective of the WiSHFUL project is to reduce the threshold for wireless experimentation by building open, flexible & adaptive software platforms with unified programming interfaces for intelligent radio and network control of off-the-shelf as well as SDR hardware platforms. These platforms are offered in wireless test facilities that follow the de facto standards for testbed interoperability set by Fed4FIRE (http://www.fed4fire.eu).

In addition WiSHFUL project aims to increase the realism of experimentation by offering portable testbeds that can be deployed at any location allowing validation in real-world environments involving real users. More info on the portable testbed can be found at:  http://www.wishful-project.eu/PortableTestbed.

Demo: The demo will showcase the use of the first release of the portable testbed that has been developed in the WiSHFUL project. The portable testbed offers identical functionality (in terms of testbed access, provisioning of resources, experiment control, monitoring, etc.) to researchers and wireless developers as if they would run their experiments in one of the advanced wireless testbeds in a fixed physical environment. Several use cases will be demonstrated on the portable tested, using heterogeneous wireless hardware (off-the-shelf: IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.11; and SDR) and using the WiSHFUL Unified Programming Interfaces (UPIs) for the real-time configuration of radio and network settings. One use case will focus on the real-time adaption of the MAC strategy (adjusting MAC protocol parameters, more specifically the contention window as a function of network load) or switching between contention-based and schedule-based MAC protocols (CSMA/CA versus TDMA). Another showcase is cross-technology control for improving coexistence of heterogeneous wireless technologies that share the same spectrum (in this use case IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4e). It will be shown that the same experiment can be run on the portable testbed as well as remotely in a fixed testbed.

FLEX experimentation environment for 5G technologies

FLEX (FIRE LTE testbeds for Experimentation) project is currently active in the Seventh Framework programme of the EC. FLEX project enhances FIRE's resource pool with remotely accessible and highly configurable LTE and beyond resources (4G/5G), that boost the experimentally driven research on the telecommunications field. The testbed setup of FLEX is based on two different approaches: 1) one based on commercial LTE equipment, using commercial Evolved Packet Core network and eNodeBs, provided by partners of the project and 2) a second approach based on the open source OpenAirInterface platform.

During the EuCNC event, we request an exhibition booth in order to demonstrate the main achievements of the FLEX project. The demonstration is targeting to raise the community awareness of the FLEX project and showcasing its potential for the experimental evaluation of technologies opted for the 5th Generation (5G) communications. The objective is to attract 5Grelated stakeholders industry, SMEs and Academia) in order to take advantage of the facilities, aiding in strengthening the experimentally driven research on wireless technologies over real testbed infrastructure.

Demo: In this demo we will showcase the achievements of the FLEX project during the first 2 years of operation: 1) the remotely accessible developed platform for evaluating inter-RAT (e.g. LTE to WiFi/WiMAX) handovers and applications, 2) in the spirit of 5G applications, an experimental evaluation of LTE in the 5GHz unlicensed band, collocated with the WiFi technology, 3) a solution for intelligent wireless back-haulingby using Software Defined Networking approaches and 4) a fully RF-interference controlled testing environment for LTE communications.

The Internet of Underwater Things

During the demo the user will interact through the SUNRISE Gate web interface with a testbed composed of static and underwater vehicles. The user will remotely instruct each vehicle on the mobility plan to run and will request the collection and visualization in real time of various measurements using the on board sensors. Both SUNSET-SDCS and DUNE will run in emulation mode, emulating the same exact set-up and user interaction demonstrated during a real infield experiments conducted in Porto, Portugal, in November 2015. A video will be projected showing the in-field operations of the same instruments and solutions used for the demo.

F-Interop: Online Interoperability, Performance and Scalability Tests for the Internet of Things

The objectives and aims of F-Interop are:

• to integrate and extend several European testbed federations with a shared “Testbed as a Service” interconnecting three European testbeds federations (Fed4FIRE, OneLab, IoT Lab), bringing together over 32 testbeds and 4755 nodes. It will develop a new architecture model enabling easier access.
• to research and develop online testing tools for the Internet of Things, including for interoperability tests, conformance tests, scalability tests, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) tests, and Energy efficiency tests
• to support IoT standardization and enable closer cooperation with the industry, through a close collaboration with standards development organizations, including ETSI, oneM2M, IETFand W3C,- and be researching and developing online certification and labelling mechanisms. F-Interop will enable an easier participation of researchers and industry in the standardization process.
• to organize an Open call for SMEs and developers to use and enrich the developed testing platform with additional modules and extensions (additional test tools, tests specifications, etc.).
• Outreach to the community, raising awareness about the F-Interop framework, specifically for SMEs and experimenters/developers.
• Demonstrate the current state of development and the vision of the F-Interop project.

Demo: We will demonstrate two modules that will be integrated in the F-Interop platform.

1. IoT interoperability test for the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP):
   In this demo, we will demonstrate a tool that allows remote online interoperability verification between two CoAP implementation.
   We will use an implementation provided by a user of the F-Interop platform, an automated implementation is driven by F-Interop without human interaction and execute the test.
   At the end of the execution, the tool will display an evaluation marking for each test case.
2. QoS monitoring based on active probes and SDN passive monitoring:
   This demo will present a monitoring tool which integrates passive measurements collected by a centralized SDN controller and active measurements collected by a distributed monitoring platform.
   The tool is based on an OpenDaylight controller and will be fully integrated in the F-Interop platform to allow users to test their network, under different conditions, in a simulated environment (based on Mininet) or on their own networks using OpenFlow switches. 

Internet of Things FIRE Testbeds and Experimental Research for the Next Generation Internet

The Internet as we know it todays is a critical infrastructure supporting and transforming all aspects of our lives. The inexorable shift towards everything connected,lead mainly by the Internet of Things paradigm, is creating a two-fold society where in one side we have data-driven world, productivity, knowledge, and experience and in the other hand a dependency for increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex networked systems. The challenge is to define how Internet will evolve based on the understanding on how the Internet behaves today and define how emergent systemic behaviours observed a posteriori will play an increasingly important role in the so called Next Generation Internet. The Internet evolves through experimentation. Individuals and companies use experiments as a way to build the knowledge and insights necessary to create viable, acceptable and innovative solutions driving benefits to Internet ecosystems and their stakeholders. In current times where most of world economies are driven by innovation and where changes in technology and culture in societies are happening rapidly due to the technology immersion, Europe must continue to play a leading role in the Next Generation Internet. Through experimentation the Next Generation Internet will evolve, engaging ecosystem in finding innovative solutions, activating business markets in Europe and world-wide, and addressing important societal challenges. To achieve this goal, fostering the creation of experimentation ecosystems and supporting the research and development of open experimentation platforms must form an integral element of public investment policy for the Next Generation Internet. FIESTA-IoT provides a Blueprint Experimental Infrastructure for Heterogeneous IoT Technologies FIESTA-IoT provides tools, techniques, processes and best practices enabling IoT testbed/platforms operators to interconnect their facilities in an interoperable way based upon cutting edge semantics-based solutions.

Demo:The 2016 EUCNC “FIRE-FIESTA-IoT Experimentation” booth will focus on explaining to the visitors the concept of Experiment-as-a-Service (EaaS), an innovative initiative that aims to capitalize value and return on investment for Research and Experimentation infrastructure in the area of the Internet of Things. FIESTA framework will be showcase in the form of demos and use cases for particular domains (i.e. smart city, smart building and automation, 4G-5G networks and smart infrastructure and users mobility). FIESTA-IoT tools and best practices that adapt data from the federated existing IoT platforms and testbeds will be also showcased. Finally the IoT data and its adaptations to a common FIESTA data model enabling compliance to common semantics will be also showcased and explained, as well as the provision of a common standards based on common interface for accessing the IoT services from the federated testbeds.

5G PPP – The 5G Public Private Partnership

The 5G Public Private Partnership (5G PPP) has been initiated by the EU Commission and industry manufacturers, telecommunications operators, service providers, SMEs and researchers. The 5G PPP will deliver solutions, architectures, technologies and standards for the ubiquitous next generation communication infrastructures of the coming decade.

The objective of the exhibition booth is to increase the visibility of 5G PPP among everyone working on 5G. It will provide overview information on the PPP overall as well as summary information of it individual projects in current Phase 1. This will help visitors to find out what projects are working on and how to get in touch with them, but also provide information on how to get involved in the activities.

Demo: Various information materials will be provided at the booth: brochures and flyers on the 5G PPP as well as on projects, video material and presentations. Stand personnel will have an overview of the PPP so that individual questions of visitors can be answered. Representatives of 5G projects as well as of the 5G Infrastructure Association will man the stand.

FANTASTIC-5G: Flexible Air iNTerfAce for Scalable service delivery wiThin wIreless Communication networks of the 5th Generation

FANTASTIC-5G is a European project which will develop a new multi-service air interface for below 6 GHz through a modular design. Ultimate target of the project is to allow the system to adapt to any means arising from diverse service requirements and device capabilities, various deployment and environment settings and mobility levels. The proof-of-concepts (PoC) target to implement key technical components developed within FANTASTIC-5G. Part of the PoCs being developed in the project will be demonstrated in this booth.

The showcasing aims at providing information about the project approach to achieve the multi-service air interface in addition to the software and hardware platforms that are being developed in FANTASTIC-5G. The focus in this demo will be on the system level simulator and different transceiver architectures. The demonstration aims at showing the validity, the feasibility and the superiority of the different components of the foreseen 5G air interface.

Demo: The different demos that will be presented in the booth are:

• 5G system level simulator (WINGs)
• P-OFDM for Async. UL in Frequency Domain and Real time D2D transmission (HWDU).
• 2x2 MIMO 5G DL transmission with FBMC-like waveform and demonstration of coexistence with legacy OFDM transmission waveform (LTE based) (CEA).
• Demonstration of Low latency modified CP-OFDM optimized for mission critical communication services (HHI).

In addition to the software and hardware platforms, description posters of the different demos will be shown.

From the antenna to the virtual RAN: proof-of-concept in Flex5Gware

The overall objective of Flex5Gware is to deliver highly reconfigurable HW platforms together with HW-agnostic SW platforms targeting both network elements and devices taking into account increased capacity, reduced energy footprint, as well as scalability and modularity. In particular, Flex5Gware is focusing on providing a proof-of-concept (PoC) of the key building blocks that 5G HW/SW platforms will be composed of. Accordingly, Flex5Gware PoCs cover the whole value chain of 5G platforms: starting from the antenna, RF module and mixed signal stages and going up to digital HW and SW aspects.

In Flex5Gware, 11 different PoCs will be all showcased in a final demo event by June 2017. However, preliminary prototypes and results of these 11 PoCs are already available. Thus, the main goal of this exhibition is to demonstrate the progress achieved in a selected set of 5 PoCs. In particular, the following will be shown: improvements in terms of reduced cost and footprint for the analogue hardware, mixed signal architectures for improved transmission rates and spectral efficiency, and, finally, increased flexibility and reduced energy techniques based on context awareness.

Demo: The exhibition area will be divided in five different areas, each one covering one of the following PoCs:

1. Compact low-profile antenna for mmWave (HW prototype + poster)
2. on-chip frequency generator for 28 GHz 5G mobile beamforming systems (HW prototype + poster)
3. full-duplex transceiver (demonstrator)
4. Reconfigurable and programmable radio platform based on information from sensors (demonstrator)
5. Flexible resource allocation in a virtual RAN environment (video + poster)

Technological Components for the Future 5G-Crosshaul

The control plane of 5G Networks will have to handle flexible reconfiguration of networks and associated network elements in order to provide the e2e services and optimization of utilized transport, storage and signal and data processing resources (i.e., computing). Additionally, a unified fronthaul/backhaul data plane architecture (referred to as crosshaul) is also under development. The first prototypes of novel technology components are being demoed at EUCNC and will be later evaluated in 4 large scale 5G testbed facilities in Europe and in Taiwan.

Creating awareness, presentation and promotion of:

• Control Plane Architecture of 5G-Crosshaul and relevant use cases and KPIs
• Novel technology components to be developed in project
• 5G testbeds at large scale and targeted integrated demonstrations

Discussion with experts in the field and interaction with other 5GPPP projects

Demo: Several technological components and 5G testbeds are presented:

• Introduction of high speed train analogue radio over fibre scenario in Taiwan
• Optical Wireless Communication for Small Cell Backhaul
• A novel Fronthaul Compression Scheme
• Flexible RAN functional split with virtualization of core network functions
• Presentation of 4 large scale 5G Testbeds and associated 5G-Crosshaul demo cases

Small Cells coordination for Multi-tenancy and Edge services

EuCNC demo tracks: Software-Defined Infrastructures, Management Technologies, Convergence with Emerging Concepts, Testbeds and Experimental Research As data traffic soars, installing small cells is an effective way to achieve greater performance and capacity to both indoor and outdoor places. The 5G-PPP SESAME project aims at providing a fresh 5G mobile network platform so as to support the ambitious goal of small cell virtualization, multi-tenancy between network operators and edge cloud services and capabilities, to be offered to both network operators and the mobile users. SESAME's key innovations focus on providing a multi-operator (multi-tenancy) enabling framework and an edge-based, virtualised execution environment.

During the Demo, the initial experimentation platform developed by the 5G-PPP SESAME project will be presented.  The objective is to show:

• SESAME architectural elements and features;
• End-to-end connectivity in the SESAME system;
• Integration of the main SESAME components: professional Evolved Packet Core (EPC), an ARM-based computing platform and a commercial LTE small cell;
• Virtualization using an ARM-based computing platform;
• Performance of an accelerated virtual switching solution.

Demo: The SESAME demo consists of three parts:

• An LTE small cell connected to an Evolved Pact Core (EPC) and an ARM-based computing platform, running Virtual Network Functions, will be connected between the small cell and the EPC for offering local IP access.
• An ARM micro-server, based on the NXP platform, running two KVM virtual machines (VMs) and an accelerated virtual switch to show availability or seamless VNF upgrade.
• Joint demonstration between the 5G-PPP SESAME and COHERENT projects, in the area of multi-domain orchestration.

Virtual Network Functions Orchestration in Heterogeneous 5G Networks

The objective of this demonstration is to showcase synergies among the H2020-COHERENT [1] and H2020-SESAME [2] projects both running under the 5GPP umbrella. This is based on a use case execution and presentation that will bridge the gap between the telecom provides and the cloud worlds by creating an integrated network service based on the services and technologies originating from both projects

Demo: The demonstration will consist of 2 PoPs (point of presence). One deployed at the SESAME booth and another deployed at the COHERENT both. A remote cloud deployed located at ZHAW premises will also be used. During the demo we plan to the delivery of the following individual services:

• Cloud-RAN deployment of a  RAN and EPC services based on the OpenAirInterface project [3] over the OpenStack+Julu framework. The service on-boarding will be performed using the Hurtle orchestrator.
• SDN-based Service Function Chaining between the cloud-deployed VNFs namely Virtual Traffic Classifier (vTC) and Virtual Media Transcoder (vMT). This leverage on both Wifi and LTE technologies in order to deliver connectivity to the end-users.
• SDN-based functional split in WiFi-based Small Cells with VNF implementing part of the Wifi MAC deployed at edge micro servers. Both data-plane and management plane functions will be considered in this demo.