Architecture landscape

The network architecture evolution journey will carry on in the years ahead, driving a large scale adoption of 5th Generation (5G) and 5G-Advanced use cases with significantly decreased deployment and operational costs, and enabling new and innovative use-case-driven solutions towards 6th Generation (6G) with higher economic and societal values. The goal of this chapter, thus, is to present the envisioned societal impact, use cases and the End-to-End (E2E) 6G architecture. The E2E 6G architecture includes summarization of the various technical enablers as well as the system and functional views of the architecture

5G-CLARITY Deliverable D6.7 Restricted Deliverable on Exploitation Plan

This document is a restricted deliverable D6.7 on the updated exploitation plan. It corresponds to the 5GCLARITY T6.4 'Exploitation, Innovation Management and IPR'. The main objective of the 5G-CLARITY WP6 is to create both the broadest awareness of the 5G-CLARITY proposed enabling technologies and their highest impact on the ecosystem. This deliverable is prepared for addressing reviewers' comments received during the project review meeting happened in July 2021. This deliverable presents the main exploitable outcomes of 5G-CLARITY project while introducing the principles and methodologies followed to identify them. Also, an update on each partner's exploitation plan is reported based on the initial proposal in 5G-CLARITY D6.1 [1]. This deliverable is positioned as an interim update on the exploitation analysis and plan. The final report on such topics will be addressed in '5G-CLARITY D6.5 – Final report on innovation management, exploitation and IPR'

5G-CLARITY Deliverable D3.2 Design Refinements and Initial Evaluation of the Coexistence, Multi-Connectivity, Resource Management and Positioning Frameworks

This document, 5G-CLARITY D3.2, aims to provide evaluation results and refinements on the initially designed 5G-CLARITY user and control plane architecture that is introduced in 5G-CLARITY D3.1 [1]. This document is also aligned with the "network function and application stratum" that covers not only user- and controlplane but also application plane functionality as presented in 5G-CLARITY D2.2 [2]. In essence, 5G-CLARITY D3.2 provides the performance evaluations and refinements for: Multi-WAT aggregation: Including 5GNR CU/DU/RU integration, integration of Wi-Fi and LiFi networks as a single non-3GPP network, integration of 3GPP and non-3GPP wireless access technologies (WATs) and assignment of traffic flows via MPTCP; 5G-CLARITY eAT3S framework: Including operational flows, initial enhanced access traffic steering, switching and splitting (enhanced AT3S / eAT3S) algorithm design and control plane aspects of the custom MPTCP scheduler; Scheduling and resource management: Including Wi-Fi and LiFi airtime-based schedulers and utilitybased scheduler to manage different service types; Positioning: Including WAT-specific positioning scheme and its performance evaluations, as well as the fusion approach; Integrated 5G/Wi-Fi/LiFi network performance evaluation: Including possible access point (AP)/gNB deployment options, achievable communication bandwidths, technology-specific areacapacity achievements and integrated network area-capacity performance. Details for the 5G-CLARITY multi-connectivity framework evaluation are presented in Section 2. The 5GCLARITY multi-connectivity design includes, i) the multi-WAT aggregation, integrating 3GPP (5GNR) and non3GPP (Wi-Fi and LiFi) access networks, and ii) an enhancement on the AT3S scheme to improve the (multiaccess based) multi-connectivity functionalities. The details of design and validation of these features for the 5G-CLARITY user- and control-plane are provided. Section 3 delivers discussions on AP level and service level (traffic routing) resource scheduling techniques. Primarily, the corresponding telemetry and performance measurements are used to route the traffic across 3GPP/non-3GPP networks in near real-time (near-RT) using 5G-CLARITY eAT3S introduced to ensure qualityof-service (QoS), and as a following step, the AP level resource scheduling is performed by the gNB and/or Wi-Fi/LiFi AP. In this respect, a Linux-kernel based airtime management evaluation framework is discussed which can be used to segregate multi-WAT resources for a given 5G-CLARITY slice. Due to LiFi’s different channel and link reliability characteristics, the airtime scheduling for the LiFi technology is specifically discussed and slicing the attocellular network resources is researched. Section 4 is focused on 5G-CLARITY multi-WAT positioning solution. The associated technologies are 60 GHz mWave, sub-6 GHz, LiFi and Optical Camera Communications (OCC) based positioning. A localisation server obtains the position information from these WATs, and provides the position estimate, by fusing all the relevant data, to the entities requiring position services. Details of the overall architecture, each technology ranging/positioning scheme, and the fusion approach are provided. The simulation architecture to evaluate the integration and performance of 5G-CLARITY multi-WAT scheme, including the corresponding user- and control-plane functionalities are presented in Section 5. Results for a dense deployment of multi-WAT AP/gNB in contrast to the generic scenario, using both conservative (based on the available technologies) and opportunistic (assuming greedy usage of available bandwidth), are presented. The achievable system area capacity in each scenario is discussed and the limiting factors are introduced. Overall, this document, 5G-CLARITY D3.2, presents the achievable KPIs of the main components of the 5GCLARITY integrated 5G/Wi-Fi/LiFi network user- and control-plane architecture. The integration of these components and the evaluation of the overall 5G-CLARITY user- and control-plane will be reported in 5GCLARITY D3.3

Towards versatile access networks

Abstract Compared to its previous generations, the 5th generation (5G) cellular network features an additional type of densification, i.e., a large number of active antennas per access point (AP) can be deployed. This technique is known as massive multipleinput multiple-output (mMIMO) [1]. Meanwhile, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) evolution, e.g., in channel state information (CSI) enhancement, and also on the study of a larger number of orthogonal demodulation reference signal (DMRS) ports for MU-MIMO, was one of the Release 18 of 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP Rel-18) work item [2]. This release (3GPP Rel-18) package approval, in the fourth quarter of 2021, marked the start of the 5G Advanced evolution in 3GPP [3]. The other items in 3GPP Rel-18 are to study and add functionality in the areas of network energy savings, coverage, mobility support, multicast broadcast services, and positioning [2]