Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
Abstract view on elevated highway, speeding concept.
© WONG SZE FEI / Fotolia

© WONG SZE FEI / Fotolia

Use Cases

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The 5G Playground is an open testbed designed to enable innovative product prototyping in a realistic, comprehensive 5G end-to-end environment, including calibration, benchmarking and interoperability tests between new prototypes and products.

For this purpose, the testbed infrastructure can be flexibly augmented by infrastructure, software network functions and service components from third parties. For the end-to-end deployment, 5G Playground offers multiple slice templates as well as additional features to be deployed at use case premises (when the use case has to be located in a specific place such as factory shop floors).

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5G+ Nomadic Node

5G Playground: Use Cases for the Nomadic Node: Fairs, Stadiums, Building sites, Public Safety
© Fraunhofer FOKUS

To extend a network capacity to a specific location, one of the most attractive use cases is to make the network portable or mobile, enabling private local communication as well as efficient backhauling to a central location or to edge nodes.

  • A portable network can be installed and configured at the specific use case location in a matter of minutes and remain in use for a specific duration of time of the use case (such as for fairs or for construction sites).
  • A mobile network has to be installed in a mobile vehicle and can follow the specific mobile communication needs at their location (such as public parades, public health or emergency networks);

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The nomadic 5G edge network is designed to test the feasibility of such a solution for 5G networks:

  • Spectrum usage around the nomadic edge node (licensed and unlicensed)
  • Connectivity of the devices to the local network – connecting the devices to the locally deployed network, including automatic configuration
  • Power management – especially the mobile edge network has to function with the spare power from the vehicle
  • Local offloading of the communication – providing support for private local communication
  • Backhaul selection between satellite and available terrestrial operators – enabling efficient communication with the central locations and the Internet for data, for control plane as well as for the management of the edge network
  • Communication over unreliable wireless backhaul – especially for the mobile network, the backhaul connectivity quality is varying while mobile.

The Nomadic 5G Edge Network was specifically designed to be able to showcase the different use cases at the use case location when needed and according to the use case requirements.

Marc Emmelmann

Contact Press / Media

Dipl.-Ing. Marc Emmelmann

Senior Scientist

Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31
10589 Berlin, Germany

Phone +49 30 3463-7268

Dense Urban Area

5G Playground, Use Cases Dense Urban Area
© Fraunhofer FOKUS

To test the efficiency of 5G as well as of nomadic deployments, opening up the environment to a massive number of users represents the first step.

The dense urban area deployment is meant to test a wider audience trial, using their own devices (which in their majority are LTE capable and could be used in a private environment only over WiFi)

  1. Providing 5G-like connectivity to today’s phones (5G over WiFi or LTE)
  2. Test network capacity with existing radio technologies
  3. The establishment of a wireless only infrastructure
  4. Assessing the live trialing with open access

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With the click on the play button an external video from www.youtube.com is loaded and started. Your data is possible transferred and stored to third party. Do not start the video if you disagree. Find more about the youtube privacy statement under the following link: https://policies.google.com/privacy

The outdoor deployment for the Berlin Festival of Lights 2019

  1. Non-3GPP (WiFi) access for the front-end to allow popular usage
  2. 5G specific authentication and authorization over WiFi (N3IWF and AMF)
  3. mmWave backhaul for wireless connected nodes
  4. A single-hop high capacity core network
  5. A comprehensive monitoring and assessment solution
  6. Live testing of security and reliability management features

News about the festival of lights 2019

Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication

Use Case Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication
© Fraunhofer FOKUS

The factory shop-floor communication is meant to test the feasibility for 5G to replace existing wireless and wired private networks with 5G communication. For this, the embedding of the 5G in the existing processes is essential.

The shop-floor demonstration is available since Nov. 2018 and includes:

  • Integration of software PLCs with test factory appliances
  • Establishment of reliable low-latency communication
  • Support for IP and non-IP data exchange with re

Automotive Testbed

5G Playground: Use Case Automotive Testbed
© Fraunhofer FOKUS

The 5G Playground automotive deployment concentrates on the limit connectivity use cases, specifically towards areas of high interest for the automotive industry such as private grounds and indoor parking places.

The automotive testbed island is enabling remote communication from and to the cars for:

  • Multimedia delivery to the car
  • Data acquisition aggregation and transmission (video included)
  • Low delay critical information (e.g. for remote steering)

The automotive island was deployed in the underground parking place of Fraunhofer FOKUS building in April 2019 and includes:

  • Coverage of the underground parking lot with 5G NSA base stations
  • A single edge computing node connecting the base stations
  • A multi-slice core network optimized for video data acquisition and dissemination as well as for low delay, ultra-reliable communication

Heterogeneous Outdoor / Indoor Island

5G Playground, Use Case wireless environment Heterogeneous Outdoor / Indoor Island
© Fraunhofer FOKUS

The outdoor deployment is designed to enable enhanced mobile broadband with high capacity 5G gNBs and mmWave backhauling and wide area connectivity for IoT overlays.

The indoor deployment is designed to enable an enterprise network, covering a continuous area of the Fraunhofer FOKUS offices.

A seamless outdoor-indoor environment is adding to the two environments a means to test a local deployment which covers some indoor area as well as some outdoor premises (such as the outdoor premises of a use case).

The indoor deployment (available since Nov 2017) is currently based on LTE access networks connected to the Open5GCore through using the building infrastructure. Through this, a dedicated network was created supplying connectivity to specific devices.

The outdoor deployment (available since Nov 2018) includes 2 small LTE cells interconnected with 60Ghz wireless backhaul between them as well as to the building site, where the same core network as for the indoor deployment is used.

Extensions of the outdoor deployment with a wide area gNB as well as with a set of small cell gNBs and eNBs were set up in April 2019.