5G EVE platform maintenance after project completion

Posted 10 June 2021

The 5G EVE project is about to be completed by the end of June 2021. This three-year project, driven by the commitment of its 28 partners, has provided Europe with a large-scale experimental platform for testing and validating vertical product and service innovations for Europe-wide 5G deployment. The testing and validation activities will continue, and there is a clear need for avoiding any disruption of the platform after June, when the project will be over.

5G EVE has worked intensively in order to ensure that the 5G EVE platform will be easily manageable by other 5G PPP projects, SMEs, and other users outside of the 5G EVE consortium, even when support will no longer be financed in the next months.

In particular, an internal agreement among the partners involved in the implementation of the four 5G EVE sites ensures that at least until the end of 2021 the facilities that are available in June will be maintained unchanged – or they will even be enhanced and extended, in case the interactions with the external users will require to do so with the resources that the external users will find for themselves. This will be facilitated by the fact that in each of the four 5G EVE sites the leading partners that work on them are also involved in other project using those facilities.

Regarding the facilities of the platform that are in common between all the sites, TIM ensures that the Interworking Layer will be maintained and preserved until at least end of 2021, and the software platform will be unchanged as well. Most of the software platform is open source and free for further updates by external users, while the parts of the software that are not open source are fully documented in the 5G EVE deliverables.

The following projects will continue to use the 5G EVE platform after June 2021:

5G-TOURS, with full support by Italian, French and Greek partners jointly in both 5G EVE and 5G-TOURS
5G-SOLUTIONS, with full support from Italian partners
5Growth, with full support from Italian and Spanish partners
5G-VICTORI, with the full support of Orange France and Romania as well as Eurécom who aim at extending the French 5G EVE cluster to Romania and reuse Open Source components (ONAP and Open Air Interface) issued from 5G EVE
5G!DRONES, with the full support of Orange France and Eurécom who aim at using mainly the Open5G Lab at Eurécom premises in Sophia-Antipolis
5G-HEART with full support from Greek partners jointly in both 5G EVE and 5G-HEART
National initiatives with the French ENGAGE 5G & Beyond project that aims at perpetuating (and improving) the 5G EVE French facility by operating some new verticals
Other projects in newer calls, such as Hexa-X, AI@EDGE, 5G DIVE, 5G-INDUCE.

The preservation of the resources in the four sites will be based on specific settings in each site:

Italian site

The local infrastructure will be maintained as of June 2021 (see Figure 1). Troubleshooting will be ensured in case of experiment execution failures – the reference person will be the Italian 5G EVE site manager. In particular, the Interworking Layer facilities will be maintained in order to ensure the possible multi-site use cases to work in the next months. The use cases in 5G-TOURS, 5G-SOLUTIONS and 5Growth will be the ones for which specific agreements have been settled with the common partners in 5G EVE (TIM, Ericsson, Nextworks, Comune Torino).

Figure 1: 5G EVE Italian Site infrastructure

French site

As illustrated in Figure 2, all the secured VPN ensuring the network connectivity between the Orange Châtillon ONAP cluster to the IWL and to the 5G EVE facilities will be maintained as well as the extension to the 4 French site (Nokia Saclay, bcom Rennes and Lannion, Eurécom Sophia Antipolis). For the support of the ONAP framework provided by Orange Poland, the connectivity will also stay in place. For the ICT-19 projects 5G-TOURS and 5G-VICTORI, the connectivity from bcom to CHU Rennes and from Orange Châtillon to Alba Lulia (Romania) already put in place will be also maintained. In terms of network infrastructure and components, the current 5G EVE French sites capabilities will be maintained, and some upgrades will be carried out to allow new features leading to better performance achievement.

Figure 2: French architecture illustrating the network connectivity in place and maintained after the end of the 5G EVE project

Spanish site

The Spanish site, hosted by 5TONIC, is described in its layout in Figure 3. The Spanish site at 5TONIC already existed before the start of 5G EVE and will continue with its activities when the project finishes, without requiring the support from European projects. However, for 5TONIC it is essential to extract value from the deployment of the 5G EVE platform to enhance its objectives as co-creation platform for 5G and beyond 5G use cases. In particular, the partners in 5TONIC will ensure the continuation of the Connected Worker Remote Operation of Quality Equipment use case in 5Growth, and they are also involved in new projects such as AI@EDGE, Hexa-X, 5G Dive, and 5G-INDUCE.

Figure 3: 5G EVE Spanish site at 5TONIC

Greek site

At the Greek site (Figure 3), two ICT-19 projects are hosted with 7 use cases, namely 5G-Tours and 5G-Heart. These projects will finish one year after the 5G-EVE project. In Greek Site there are two 5G EPC platforms (one from NOKIA and one from Ericsson). Furthermore, there is one OSM and one Kafka provided by WINGS. So for the needs of 5G-Tours the Greek Site 5G-EVE infrastructure will remain up and running for one year more, till the end of project, since OTE as Site manager, NOKIA-GR as 5G EPC provider and WINGS with OSM and Kafka, participate to the project; for the needs of 5G-Heart the Greek Site 5G-EVE infrastructure will remain up and running for more than one year, till the end of the project, since OTE as Site manager, ERICSSON as 5G EPC provider, WINGS with OSM and Kafka, participate to the project too.