5GCity: 5G Neutral Host

5G Neutral Host Overview

5GCity has designed and developed a distributed cloud and radio platform for municipalities and infrastructure owners acting as 5G neutral hosts. The 5GCity platform and service tools allow service orchestration and deployment in a completely decentralised 3-tier architecture, where compute, storage and networking are allocated between core and edge segments of the 5G network in the city. Live trial instantiations and demonstrations were run by Ajuntament de Barcelona, Comune di Lucca and University of Bristol, with support from i2CAT, Nextworks, Accelleran, Cellnex, Virtual Open System, Italtel, Ubiwhere, ADLINK, WindTre.

These trials demonstrated the capacity of a single virtualised and sliceable infrastructure to serve different Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and even vertical operators.

In 5GCity, the entity providing and operating the infrastructure is the Neutral Host operator.

The 5GCity deployment consisted in creating and activating several network slices over a shared infrastructure. Each slice was composed of a compute chunk, network chunk and mobile radio chunk.

The network slices deployed through 5GCity Software defined (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) orchestration systems emulate different Mobile Network Operators (MNO) acting as virtual network operators on top of the 5G Neutral Host.

5G Empowerment

The research carried out within the 5GCity project shows great potential to impact diverse stakeholders within the whole 5G value chain. Municipalities are the privileged entities to act as future 5G neutral hosts because they own and manage the best urban spaces where 5G Small Cells can be deployed. Telcos and service providers can more easily provision services within the cities, using dense Small Cell deployments, thus avoiding deep infrastructure transformations and associated costs. Vertical industries also are impacted by the 5GCity Neutral Host as they can simply lease, on demand, their private network and resources needed for their business application from the Neutral Host, enabling them to focus on their core application offering. SMEs working for both Telcos and Verticals can gain more opportunities to join the value-chain, as the neutral host platform can be opened up for custom solutions and various support services, from service design to operations.

5G Key Performance Indicators

The following five KPIs targets were achieved during the pilots:

• KPI #1 Target - Multi-latency: ≥ 3 slices
• KPI #1 Achieved: Barcelona - Bristol - Lucca: 3 slices
• KPI #2 Target - User experience data rate: 30 Mbps
• KPI #2 Achieved: Barcelona 44.7 Mbps; Bristol 44.5 Mbps; Lucca 44.7 Mbps
• KPI #3 target - Data Plane Delay: ˂= 15 ms
• KPI #3 Achieved: Bareclona 11.3 ms; Bristol 11.5 ms;  Lucca 8 ms (edge); 10 ms (core)
• KPI #4 Target - Isolation Guarantees: Ensured
• KPI #4 Achieved: Ensured in all 3 cities
• KPI #5 Target - Slice Deployment Time: ˂= 30 ms
• KPI #5 Achieved: Barcelona 21.35s; Bristol 26.53s; Lucca 36.7s (due to temporary resources assigned to the 5GCity Platform components in terms of VRAM (video random access memory) and VCPU (virtual central processing unit).

Exploitation of Results

5GCity has published all its orchestration software as Open Source to increase impact and uptake. More details are available on the 5GCity Software Organisation on GitHub. 

Videos and Demos

Specific details of the deployments in the three cities are available in the following videos:

• Pilot Infrastructure in Barcelona
• Pilot Infrastructure in Lucca
• Pilot Infrastructure in Bristol

A full description of the 5GCity Neutral Hosting demo with reference to measured KPIs is available here. 

Accolades

One of the ten winners of the 2021 5G-IA Trials Working Group annual competition, featuring in the 5G Infrastructure PPP Brochure - Trials and Pilots. 

Use Case Summary Data

Locations:  Barcelona (Spain), Bristol (UK) and Lucca (Italy). 

Dates: Q2-2019-Q2-2020

Partners involved: Ajuntament de Barcelona, Comune di Lucca and University of Bristol, Fundació i2CAT, Accelleran, Cellnex, Virual Open System SARL, Italtel SpA, Ubiwhere, ADLINK, Nextworks SRL, WindTre, Bristol is Open, 

Other 5GCity partners: Comunicare Digitale, Incites consulting SARL, Informació i Comunicació de Barcelona TV, Institut Municipal d’Informàtica de Barcelona (City Council of Barcelona), MOG Technologies SA, Rai-Radiotelevisione italiana SpA, Retevision.

5GCity Website | Twitter @5GCity

EC Funding Reference: Horizon 2020, H2020-ICT-2016-2; Topic: ICT-8-2016

Funding Cycle: June 2017-March 2020