An Architecture for Creating Slices to Experiment on Wireless Networks.

Researchers in mobile technologies and services are currently requesting testbeds to validate their proposals in a realistic large-scale and controlled environment. Such demands are some times satisfied with private ad-hoc deployments in a given area of coverage. However, given national regulations related to the use of the spectrum and the cost of deployments, these solutions are not feasible for most researchers. In this paper, we introduce the architecture of the research infrastructure developed in the EuWireless project. EuWireless’ objective is to provide private networks that can be dynamically created as slices with different levels of configuration and control, as a cost-effective way to access large-scale testbeds with a licensed spectrum even in different countries. The paper focuses on the architecture of the Point of Presence, the key element in the EuWireless project, and how it will work in practice. We also present a proof of concept implementation that satisfies some of the design objectives and demonstrates the feasibility of the proposal.The EuWireless project is funded by the EU Commission under the H2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 777517 and is coordinated by the University of Malaga (UMA). This work is also funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities project RTI2018-099777-B-I00

Expanding GÉANT Testbeds Service to Support Pan-European 5G Network Slices for Research in the EuWireless Project

This paper presents the design options for creating a Pan-European mobile network for research in the context of the European Horizon 2020 EuWireless project. The most likely direction is a platform that makes it easier to create network slices for research. In this context, we identify one promising technology to implement network slicing in 5G networks: the framework GÉANT Testbeds Service (GTS). GTS is currently a production service by GÉANT that offers remote construction and use of virtual testbeds for wired networks mapped to the real GÉANT infrastructure. These GTS-virtualized testbed environments conform to Software Define Networks (SDNs) principles and offer compute, storage, and switching resources, at scale and with line rate performance. In this paper, we explain how the current (wired oriented) GTS can be extended with the 5G components, such as radio access nodes (gNBs), transport networks, user devices, etc., in order to implement 5G network slices. Our first conclusion is that using GTS for EuWireless implementation is feasible, dramatically increasing the potential impact of this service in the research community