The French facility is an integral part of the IMAGINE-B5G platform, consisting of four facilities that boast cutting-edge 5G capabilities dedicated to conducting vertical trials and pilots. Within the French facility represented by Eurecom, several diverse environments are available, enabling the execution of numerous use cases.
The French facility is located at the Sophia Antipolis science park within the SophiaTech Campus. Sophia Antipolis is Europe’s largest and permanently expanding science and technology park.
Open5GLab at EURECOM provides experimental 5G services including eMBB, URLLC and mMTC. Based on fully open-source tools and open-architecture design, it provides the means to on-board new network functions to the running 5G infrastructure and test them in both a controlled laboratory setting and in a deployed live network. It is the main experimental playground for OAI and M5G SW packages. In addition, the French facility will provide its open-source advanced 5G network-in-a-box, which will allow trials in locations outside the coverage area of the fixed infrastructure.
The French facility RAN platform is based on OAI open source software, with indoor and outdoor deployments. The FR1 RAN platform is split into CU, DU, and RU, following two functional splits:
- Split 7.2: OAI CU and DU use commercial RUs from VVDN, LiteON, and Benetel (indoor and outdoor).
- Split 8: OAI CU and DU use USRPs (B210, N300, X310, indoor) and commercial RUs from AW2S (indoor and outdoor).
The FR1 RAN setup operates at bands 38 (2.6 GHz) and 78 (3.4 GHz) with support for multiple subcarrier-spacing and bandwidth sizes, different TDD configurations and Procedures for 4-layer DL and 2-layer UL MIMO with 256 QAM modulation.
The CU and DU implement the E2 interface with the RIC, tested with FlexRIC RIC that supports O-RAN compliant RC v1.3 and KPM v2 Service Models (SMs) along with custom SMs for specific use cases such as dynamic TDD.
The core network solution in the French facility employs a partial 3GPP 5GC service-based architecture with various Network Functions (NFs). It is fully open and configurable using docker containers and exposed interfaces. The UPF can be deployed as software on a general-purpose machine or as an application on a P4-programmable switching fabric. OAI 5G CN is compatible with different gNBs and supports traffic steering using UL/CL UPF and PCF for routing traffic to different edges or the public cloud.
The site’s computing resources are divided into several clusters with different purposes: production use-cases for RAN/CORE/Edge, testing use-cases, and development. New clusters can be easily created, and the network topologies are fully configurable using the facility’s SDN switching fabric.
To make use of the platform offered and the cutting edge technologies that we provide, the French facility welcomes you to join and co-create new use cases or participate in the evolution of the facility with new platform extensions.
The French facility welcomes the opportunity to co-create value-added use cases and extend the facility with the Open Call partners.
