Imagine-B5G Facilities: The Norway Facility

In the IMAGINE-B5G project, the large-scale 5G platform in the Norway facility provides 5G services for a large number of users with near-commercial performance. The facility will serve:

1. vertical customers to experiment and validate their 5G-driven applications; 
2. solution providers to integrate innovative solutions into the 5G platform and verify the functionality and performance in the end-to-end context;
3. telco operators to evaluate the deployment options of various 5G and B5G services and technologies, and identify the optimal solutions for the commercial 5G rollout.

The Norway facility is featured with: 

• Cloud-native infrastructure: The whole facility is built in the cloud-native environments. However, to account for the diversity of various vertical applications, the Norway facility offers both container-based and VM-based options to onboard applications.  
• Full-stack orchestration to automate the lifecycle management of both the network services and vertical applications. It eases up the onboarding of vertical use cases at a scale and gives an opportunity to explore the benefits of deploying multiple verticals concurrently for mobile operators and service providers.  

• A best of breed 5G stand-alone (SA) core network, jointly provisioned by three world-class partners, Oracle, ENEA, and CASA systems. The cutting-edge multi-vendor 5G SA core enables flexible innovations and value creation in both the facility itself and the vertical use cases running in the facility.  

• Multi-site services: the facility has deployed 1) three RAN sites in Fornebu, Trondheim, and Svalbard in Norway as a part of the public network; 2) two private 5G networks (NPNs) dedicated to Industry 4.0 and eHealth; 3) and three Network on Wheels (NOWs) dedicated for PPDR and Forestry. In addition, several new RAN sites are under establishment to accommodate verticals like Media. The multi-site coverage will facilitate the experiments of advanced use cases spanning across multiple geographical locations.  

• Staged testing environment: the facility will provide two types of environments:

1. a stable and reliable environment with fundamental 5G network services and capabilities for verticals to test their applications; 
2. an experimental environment for validating B5G services and advanced features.  

• Customized edge clouds to meet the demands of various verticals, such as autonomous edge for verticals with high-reliability requirements; and local breakout edge for verticals with low latency requirements.  
• Professional security solutions: provided by Palo Alto to both secure the traffic in and out of the platform, and  secure applications from code to cloud to accelerate the development and deployment of secure cloud-native applications.  

The Norway facility welcomes the opportunity to co-create value-added use cases and extend the facility with the Open Call partners.