NSF visit at French 5G EVE site facility in Sophia Antipolis
French 5G EVE site facility at EURECOM in Sophia Antipolis
On 11th and 12th March, a delegation of researchers representing the NSF, the National Science Foundation of the United States, visited EURECOM’s open5GLab in Sophia Antipolis, one of the locations of the French 5G EVE site facility. The visit of the US researchers was the second in a series of planned visits to several European research facilities involved in the 5G PPP infrastructure projects.
Manu Gosain (left) and Ivan Seskar from the NSF delegation
The NSF delegation consisted of Manu Gosain, Technical Program Director of the PAWR Project Office, who also acts as the liaison with other large-scale NSF projects, and Ivan Seskar, Program Director of the COSMOS project. In addition to the on-site visit, a remote session with representatives of the POWDER and AERPAW projects took place on 12th March.
The two-day visit started with presentations by the managers of the French 5G EVE facility and Sophia Antipolis site, Rodolphe Legouable from Orange and Raymond Knopp from EURECOM, on the project status and French facility capabilities. This was complemented by Adlen Ksentini, the manager at EURECOM for the 5G!DRONES ICT-19 project, who presented a use case of the 5G-EVE Sophia Antipolis site, namely 5G-Slicing for UAV communications. Next, Francesco Mani from EURECOM presented the current status of the OpenAirInterface (OAI) open-source 5G implementation, followed by live demonstrations of outdoor 5G links using the OAI RAN and Core on the 5G-EVE facility. Finally, Navid Nikaein from EURECOM presented an additional demonstration of a Kubernetes Operator-based deployment of OAI.
The participants from the US and Europe discussed several collaboration opportunities at the meeting aiming at mutualisation of USA PAWR resources. These included testing OAI-based solutions for 5G deployments at POWDER and COSMOS, integration of OAI RAN and Core software with ONAP infrastructure at COSMOS, and replication of 5G NR FR2 (mmWave) configurations currently used at the French 5G EVE facility and at all the PAWR sites in the USA.
