Concept

The 5G-SOLUTIONS concept is based on:

  1. Formulating a wide set of innovative, heterogeneous use cases spanning across five vertical industries in a complementary way.
  2. Providing the technological enablers for facilitating the execution of the field trials over specific ICT-17 5G facilities.
    • A unified Cross-Domain Service Orchestration based on automation enabling multi-domain slicing and 5G service lifecycle automation.
    • A smart KPI visualization system for automating the analysis and presentation of the results obtained from ICT-17 facilities and presenting them through an intuitive user-friendly dashboard in graphical form in near real time.
    • A set of open-standards easy-to-use intent-based APIs, including application APIs for facilitating the development, portability, provisioning of and interactions with new user-friendly applications and solutions that require 5G capabilities by SMEs and/or vertical specific systems.

Innovative vertical industries use cases

The use cases, which will be validated in the Living Labs, have been carefully selected to represent compelling services that are expected to have a high future business potential and economic impact in strategic vertical industry segments that require 5G performance capabilities and which cannot be offered with the current operational capabilities of 4G. As representative examples, such use cases have been identified in the vertical domains of Factories of the Future, Smart Energy, Smart Cities, Smart Ports, and Media & Entertainment, which will benefit the most from 5G network deployments.

These vertical domains, whose use cases will be technology-wise and business-wise validated in Living Labs, will directly engage end-user actors (industrial and their customers) and have been carefully grouped in three complementary Clusters (i.e. Industry 4.0, Smart Urban Environment and Enhanced User Experience) as shown in the following figure, mapped with the eMBB, URLLC and mMTC service classes and aligned with the 5G-PPP Vision.

Architectural concept

The 5G-SOLUTIONS architectural concept is based on a modular architecture in which the various technological enablers are integrated together via open interfaces and APIs. These enablers will facilitate the measurement and visualisation of 5G KPIs of the vertical use cases in near real-time whilst exercised in the field, as well as benchmarking and access from multiple locations, whilst promoting openness for 3rd party developers for the development of new innovative applications. The architecture features automatic resource scaling, by leveraging virtualisation technologies and cloud automation scripts to elastically scale according to workload demand. This provides the necessary flexibility for the system to adapt to new interfaces, data sources, GDPR compliant data processing, machine learning and representation requirements as may be required during the interfacing with the ICT-17 facilities.  

The technological enablers to be implemented in 5G-SOLUTIONS and the interconnected 5G infrastructure (i.e. measurement portals, slicing, virtualisation, 5G testbed orchestration and infrastructures from ICT-17 5G-EVE Turin and 5G-VINNI Norway and Patra facilities) are indicated in blue and grey colours, respectively.