Contact: portugal-facility@5g-vinni.eu
The 5G-VINNI facility in Portugal is located in Aveiro. It is based on extensive computational and networking infrastructure available at Altice Labs and Instituto de Telecomunicações. The facility will be integrated in the “Aveiro 5G City” initiative, including multiple 5G-related activities and projects, both national and international, in which Altice Labs is playing the leading role. The facility will be able to support and showcase a wide range of 5G features and functionalities.
Experimentation activities to be carried out in the Portugal facility will be targeted at the following areas:
- NG-PON2-based 5G fronthauling & backhauling; throughput capacity, fixed/mobile convergence, cost reduction
- Edge Computing: low latency, bandwidth efficiency
In these areas, Altice Labs will make use of components developed in-house or in the scope of previous H2020 projects. These components can be replicated in different 5G-VINNI facility sites.
Summary of capabilities
- NG-PON2-based 5G front/backhaul (Altice Labs)
- Service Orchestration (SONATA)
- NFVI (OpenStack)
- SDN (ODL)
- Cloud RAN
- Edge Computing
The KPIs to be tested, validated and demonstrated at the facility will be mainly related with the technical areas identified above. These are, among others:
- reliability/resiliency (URLCC)
- throughput (eMBB)
- latency (URLCC)
- service deployment time (all)
- costs savings (CapEx and OpEx)
In the Portugal facility, several use cases will be developed including transportation (5G-enhanced railway control systems), energy distribution (advanced smart grid infrastructures) and public network resilience (edge network components and ICT systems). In addition, other use cases may be developed.
In terms of infrastructure, broadly speaking, three main areas can be defined:
- NG-PON2 access network technology for 5G mobile fronthaul/backhaul connectivity;
- Edge Cloud infrastructure, including Edge Computing components and virtual BBU;
- Core Cloud infrastructure, including 5G Core and orchestration components.
A brief description is provided below.
Access/Edge network infrastructure:
- vBBU: Cloud-Based Centralized Base-Band Unit, featuring packet-based fronthaul/midhaul support;
- ONT-NGPON2-5G: Remote Radio Head, featuring native NG-PON2 uplink, with packet-based fronthaul, in line with CPRI over Ethernet (eCPRI), Next Generation Fronthaul Interface (NGFI) and Radio over Ethernet (RoE);
- ONT-NGPON2-eCPRI: Mobile FrontHaul Gateway, between packet-based NG-PON2 fronthaul (eCPRI/NGFI) and RRHs supporting CPRI/OBSAI interface.
Cloud/SDN/NFV infrastructure:
- The testbed infrastructure is described in 5G-VINNI Deliverable D2.1, available at 5g-vinni.eu/deliverables.
Architectural components in the Portugal facility site
