News Software-based Networks

To mark the conclusion of the CampusOS flagship project, 22 partners from industry and research have published a guideline for the development and operation of open and modular 5G campus networks. These networks offer an alternative to the monolithic solutions of established providers and, through their Open RAN-based approach, promote the digital sovereignty of European companies. 5G campus networks can be deployed in various sectors, such as logistics, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare.

The lead project CampusOS, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, will be showcasing how to successfully set up and operate a 5G campus network in industry at the Hannover Messe in the 5G Arena (Hall 15, booth H13) from April 22-26, 2024. Experience the new possibilities using representative application examples in Industry 4.0, logistics and robotics, safe teleoperated driving, on construction sites or in the clinic networked with 5G.

Flexibility, high levels of innovation and more competition – the CampusOS consortium, consisting of 22 partners from industry and research, has published a position paper that highlights the advantages of open, modular campus networks.

At the airfield in Schönhagen, ALADIN partners today demonstrated how a temporary local 5G network can improve forest firefighting. In various field tests, an overall solution was integrated so that emergency forces can now be networked, firefighting robots and drones can be controlled, and situational images can be transmitted to the operations center in real-time.

On 6 June 2023, 6G-SANDBOX, a pan-European testbed for 6G experimentation funded by Smart Networks and Service Joint Undertaking under Horizon Europe, announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the European Space Agency (ESA) to advance innovation used to integrate satellites with terrestrial networks built on 5G and future 6G technologies by connecting 6G-SANDBOX testbeds with ESA 5G/6G Hubs.

When it comes to activities such as fighting forest fires, monitoring construction sites or providing multimedia services at sports and other mass events, a reliable, secure 5G campus network is often needed locally and temporarily to ensure maximum network coverage on the entire site. Thanks to the 5G+ Nomadic Node from the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, this kind of non-public, temporary network can be set up at short notice in order, for instance, to connect emergency forces with each other or control firefighting robots remotely. The entire hardware and software fits into a couple of mobile server rack containers. The operation of the adapted 5G mobile network with a satellite connection will be presented at the Hannover Messe 2022 from May 30 to June 2 at the joint Fraunhofer booth in Hall 5, Booth A06.

At the beginning of the year the flagship project CampusOS was launched. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) with 18,1 million euros over the next three years. The Fraunhofer Institutes HHI and FOKUS are coordinating the project. The goal of the project is to build a modular ecosystem for open 5G campus networks based on open radio technologies and interoperable network components. This will create vendor independence and enable more competition and innovation to empower the digital sovereignty of companies in Germany. To this end, 22 partners from industry and research are testing different operating models, developing reference architectures, and evaluating the interoperability and performance of integrated solutions in reference test areas. Beyond that, they are testing selected scenarios as prototypes in an industrial environment.

In the Fraunhofer Lighthouse project 6G SENTINEL five Fraunhofer institutes are bundling their know how to develop key radio and core network technologies for 6G. The project has published its first whitepaper containing new perspectives on 6G use cases, a high-level classification of challenges and requirements as well as first steps towards an end-to-end 6G architecture.

Beginning in August, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the establishment of four hubs for research into the future technology 6G with up to 250 million euros. Fraunhofer FOKUS will be involved in two of them over the next four years: the “6G Research and Innovation Cluster” (6G-RIC) and the Open6GHub. Drawing on its many years of 4G and 5G core network expertise, the team from the Software-based Networks business unit will design essential components for an organic, distributed 6G core network and integrate them into the emerging test environments.

Initiated and supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), Fraunhofer FOKUS and partners have developed in the SATis5 project a 5G test environment that brings together satellite and terrestrial communication technologies. The project team has evaluated various use cases in a real over-the-air test environment, proving this technology convergence. In the whitepaper “Satellite is 5G”, satellite technology's advantages in a 5G network are presented in detail.

At the beginning of 2021, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft launched 6G SENTINEL, a lighthouse project to develop key technologies for the future 6G mobile communications standard. Five participating Fraunhofer Institutes are pooling their expertise in order to collectively attain a position at the technological vanguard of 6G research. The focus of their work will be on terahertz technologies and solutions for flexible networks.

Within the 5x5G funding program of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI), the handover of the funding document for the ALADIN (Advanced Low Altitude Data Information System) project took place on 26.01.2021. The Federal Minister of Transport Andreas Scheuer virtually handed the document over to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Rüther-Kindel from the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau on behalf of the entire consortium.

Press Release – Thanks to the interoperability of the Open5GCore by Fraunhofer FOKUS, companies can flexibly use a wide range of radio technologies of various manufacturers when setting up 5G networks. This facilitates healthy competition and supports companies in testing local, reliable, secure and future-proof 5G “standalone” campus networks.

At the end of October, the Bundesnetzagentur published the fees for frequencies in the range from 3.7 GHz to 3.8 GHz for local applications, thus laying the foundation for campus networks, i.e. a company's own network on factory premises. Fraunhofer FOKUS discussed the technical implementation of such private networks with partners from industry and science at the Industrial IoT (IIoT) Forum and the FOKUS FUSECO Forum (FFF) from November 6-8, 2019, and presented various 5G demonstrations for the factory of the future.

At the 10th FOKUS Fuseco Forum (FFF), the FOKUS researchers will present a field trial with a portable 5G network, which they carried out with partners at the Berlin Festival of Lights. The FFF will take place on November 7th and 8th in Berlin. During these two days, international telecommunications experts from science, business and politics will discuss trends and challenges in the use of 5G.

Large scale trials for Railway, Energy, Media and Factories of the Future are planned. Fraunhofer FOKUS provides the 5G testbed infrastructure based on its 5G Playground which is already used in the 5Genesis and 5G-Vinni infrastructure projects to provide a 5G testbed platform.

On the 30th of July, the start of the three-year project “Enhancing Lighting for the Internet of Things” (ELIoT) was announced. The aim of the project is the development of marketable IoT applications based on LiFi – Internet by light. As a project partner Fraunhofer FOKUS ensures the integration of LiFi into 5G networks.

This year, the Bundesnetzagentur will allocate frequencies for local networks for the first time in Germany. With the fourth version of its “Open5GCore”, Fraunhofer FOKUS offers one of the world's first standards-based and manufacturer-independent 5G core networks. Thereby enabling Fraunhofer FOKUS to provide a technically mature test infrastructure for private and industrial 5G networks.

At the 2nd international IIoT Forum, Fraunhofer FOKUS‘ IIoT Center officially launches the TSN Interoperability Lab and enters into a strategic partnership with Spirent Communications.

In industries that rely on robust and secure low-latency communication, centralized clouds will soon be a thing of the past: Edge Computing promises to bring data processing closer to the source. During today’s “Edge Computing Forum”, Fraunhofer FOKUS and industry partners announced that they are planning to found the “Edge Computing Consortium Europe” in the coming year, to get the technology concept ready for the market more quickly.