Authors: Antonella Clavenna
Organization: Italtel
The heterogeneous nature of 5G and B5G networks comprises multiple access networks, frequency bands, and cells, sometimes with overlapping coverage areas. This presents operators with network planning and deployment challenges. Radio Access Networks are going to act as new communication platforms ensuring that applications can run efficiently in terms of required performance, demanded capacity, and consumed energy.
Considering this evolving background, the need to optimize the utilization of available resources and, at the same time, to maximize user-perceived QoE while preserving security and privacy, are just some of the challenges NANCY is going to face and will try to overcome, especially to support those applications that require high data throughput, low latency, massive connectivity, accurate localization, AI/ML-based optimization techniques, over-the-top security and privacy features, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), Autonomous Vehicles, and applications that require precise positioning and synchronization.
In this context, evaluating NANCY B-RAN architecture, which leverages blockchain technology implemented for RAN resource sharing, requires understanding the impact of this technology on different network parameters and KPIs, while carefully considering both energy efficiency and sustainability, without compromising performance.
To this aim, NANCY will test and validate the technological solutions identified during the project in different testbeds and demonstrators. Five different test environments are envisaged in the project to enable experimentation with NANCY platform deployment and evaluation of B-RAN architecture under different scenarios.
This post will provide a special focus on the Italian in-lab testbed, which provides a collaborative environment for testing and evaluating some of the NANCY’s achievements.
The Italian in-lab testbed, set up at Italtel’s headquarters in Milan (Italy), provides a MEC-assisted 5G network scenario with a video streaming application for generating traffic. By leveraging integrated open-source components, it allows for flexibility in adjusting and integrating new network functions and applications, such as those developed in NANCY to enhance existing 5G technology and move towards future B5G/6G networks.
The testbed integrates Software Defined Radio (SDR) for prototyping and deployment, specifically USRP SDR which provides a software-defined RF architecture to design, prototype, and deploy wireless systems with custom signal processing. It hosts user equipment (UE), attached to a virtualized gNB instance running on a shared computing platform. The UE consists of a radio head and a set of dedicated computing resources provided by a Supermicro®. Such resources host the complete radio protocol stack and processes from heterogeneous mobile applications.
Both UE and gNB use a USRP x310 board as a radio head, and the srsRAN software to implement the radio protocol stack. The gNB USRP board is attached to the computing pool via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 connector, while the srsRAN gNB runs as containerized software instances using Docker. The UE is connected to the gNB, emulating the traffic volume generated over a cell.
More in detail, the equipment available in the Italian in-lab Testbed consists of:
– a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Host, an Edge server integrating a GPU (NVIDIA P4), as HW accelerator to increase performance (portable)
– a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) SuperServer SYS-741GE-TNRT + 2 GPU NVIDIA A40 (Supermicro®)
– 2xEttus X310 2xUBX160 board (USRP X310 High-Performance Software Defined Radio – Ettus Research);
– an open 5G RAN system, using open-source SW (5g-srsRAN Project – Open source 4G/5G software suites developed by Software Radio Systems, running on an Intel® NUC, and Open5GCore running on an intel-based server)
– OctoClock-G CDA-2990
The Italian testbed is designed to test and validate the following technologies used in NANCY:
– Blockchain & RAN (specifically O-RAN)
– Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC signature for Blockchain)
– Linux Kernel Scheduling
– Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI)
Considering the last one mentioned above, as stated in the previous blog post “Edge Virtualization in the Era of 5G: Exploring Alternative Solutions”, NANCY will also develop a new architectural component targeting to open a new form of virtualization to the high-level NANCY orchestrators.
To test and validate this technology, Italtel testbed makes available a MEC-assisted 5G network scenario where it has also been integrated an ARMv8 edge server: the SK-AM69x Texas Instruments board (provided by Virtual Open Systems). The following image shows the testbed detail where the integrated SK-AM69x Texas Instruments board is highlighted (box with the red dotted line).
In the Italian in-lab testbed, special attention is given to the edge segment of the network, for testing and validating the NANCY Secured Virtualization platform while exploiting at the same time the potential of Edge Computing.
More in detail, the NANCY Secured Virtualization platform enables secure application deployment and lifecycle management at the Edge, providing “isolation” through Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), since applications running in the TEE are completely isolated from each other. At the same time, Edge Computing helps to increase the QoS of applications’ demand (in terms of lowering latency, reducing bandwidth consumption, improving privacy, etc.).
In addition to this, in the Italian in-lab testbed it will be possible to test and validate:
- NANCY functionalities on different types of Edge servers, being able to experiment on both ARM- and traditional x64 architectures
- an “edge execution environment” with special security features dedicated to certain types of applications
- NANCY PQC signature for Blockchain, running on Linux Debian OS, to ensure the authentication of blockchain wallets through a “Smart card solution” that is connected respectively to the system through a smart card reader and to the user environment through a USB connection.
The Italtel testbed set-up provides the usage scenario “Fronthaul network of fixed topology”, both for Direct connectivity and Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP). The CoMP scenario is the one illustrated in the image below.
In the Italian in-lab testbed some datasets have already been collected for modelling the B-RAN, assessing its performance and validating the developed theoretical framework.
The datasets contain time series, collected by transmitting video content through the Italtel Video streaming and Transcoding Unit (VTU) application, which can convert audio and video streams from one format to another, at multiple encodings schemes, changing resolution, bitrate, and video parameters.
Additionally, these datasets, related to the observation of some of the resources involved in the usage scenario “Fronthaul network of fixed topology”, are also relevant to assess the intrinsic characteristics of the testbed, dependent only on the available equipment, before and without considering the impact of NANCY architecture and components, so as to establish a baseline against which the impact of the functionalities developed in NANCY can be subsequently assessed.
The datasets are available on both IEEE and Zenodo at the links indicated below:
- NANCY SNS-JU PROJECT “ITALIAN IN-LAB TESTBED DATASET 1” D6.6:
http://ieee-dataport.org/12093
https://zenodo.org/records/10489608 - NANCY SNS-JU PROJECT “ITALTEL ITALIAN IN-LAB TESTBED – LATENCY METRICS”:
https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/nancy-sns-ju-project-italtel-italian-lab-testbed-latency-metrics
https://zenodo.org/records/11047037
