A 5G facility for trialing and testing vertical services and applications

With its low latency and high speeds, 5G aims to support vertical services like automotive, industry, agriculture, and manufacturing. Unlike the precedent mobile generations, which just provided voice and data to domestic and business customers, 5G aims to create a common infrastructure to support diverse requirements of the vertical industry’s needs in terms of communication and networking capabilities, such as high data rate and low latency. But before a commercial deployment, a trial phase is needed to validate that the network can support these requirements. In this context, several 5G facilities have been established to run 5G trials, mainly built to be used by networking experts. However, vertical service owners have small to no knowledge of the technical details of the 5G infrastructure. In this article, we introduce EURECOM 5G facility, which was specifically designed to run vertical use cases by abstracting and simplifying as much as possible the trial deployment and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) collection. EURECOM 5G facility provides a rich number of 5G components to test, including 5G New Radio, Network Slicing, Edge Computing, and KPI visualization, allowing verticals to have a real 5G environment for testing their applications and services. Finally, the facility relies mainly on open-source components.