Requirements and design of 5G experimental environments for vertical industry innovations

In a global concerted effort, the networking
community is defining 5G as the next generation networking
infrastructure. New in the approach is the focus on the
requirements of the vertical sectors. The salient characteristic of
these sectors is that they are rapidly becoming open ecosystems
built on top of common infrastructures. This requires a high
degree of technological convergence among vertical industries
empowering them with technical capacity and triggering the
development of new, innovative products, applications and
services. On the technology side, 5G is adopting new concepts
and developments such as virtualization at all levels of the
infrastructure enabling the 5G network infrastructure to become
a key asset of the emerging common environment for technical
and business innovation in the vertical sectors. In order to
answer the questions “How holistic and unified such an
environment can be?”, and “How an infrastructure can satisfy
and reconcile competing requirements of the vertical sectors?”,
we present the concept and approach of 5GINFIRE, a project
that is tasked to build and operate an open, and extensible 5G
NFV-based reference ecosystem of experimental facilities, laying
down the foundations for a fully software controlled instantiation
of virtual networks meeting the requirements of the vertical
sectors.In a global concerted effort, the networking
community is defining 5G as the next generation networking
infrastructure. New in the approach is the focus on the
requirements of the vertical sectors. The salient characteristic of
these sectors is that they are rapidly becoming open ecosystems
built on top of common infrastructures. This requires a high
degree of technological convergence among vertical industries
empowering them with technical capacity and triggering the
development of new, innovative products, applications and
services. On the technology side, 5G is adopting new concepts
and developments such as virtualization at all levels of the
infrastructure enabling the 5G network infrastructure to become
a key asset of the emerging common environment for technical
and business innovation in the vertical sectors. In order to
answer the questions “How holistic and unified such an
environment can be?”, and “How an infrastructure can satisfy
and reconcile competing requirements of the vertical sectors?”,
we present the concept and approach of 5GINFIRE, a project
that is tasked to build and operate an open, and extensible 5G
NFV-based reference ecosystem of experimental facilities, laying
down the foundations for a fully software controlled instantiation
of virtual networks meeting the requirements of the vertical
sectors.