WorkshopAdvanced spectrum management in 5G+ networks7th March 2018

BT Centre, London

Welcome Workshop aims and content

I’m delighted to welcome you to our headquar-ters, BT Centre, for the workshop on Advanced Spectrum Management in 5G+ Networks, spon-sored by the EU project Speed-5G.

BT has a long history of innovation, in fact we can trace our origins back to 1837, when Sir Wil-liam Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheat-stone filed a patent for the world’s first practical electric telegraph. From this they founded The Electric Telegraph Company, the seed business that eventually grew into BT.

We’ve continued to innovate ever since and we believe that purposeful innovation – a fusion of scientific breakthrough, practical engineering and a purpose – can change the world.

However, no-one has a monopoly on good ideas, and that’s why we’re always keen to work with

The workshop organized at the BT premises in London will focus on selected aspects of a key topic in 5G and 5G+ networks, i.e. spectrum management of wireless systems.

With the decision from regulatory bodies to add a new radio access technology, the so-called 5G New Radio (NR), to traditional cellular bands be-low 6GHz and to free for cellular usage also bands between 28 and 40 GHz, the 3GPP stan-dards bodies have started normative work for the usage of those bands. In December 2017 the first set of such features, the so-called 5G phase 1, was standardized under the 3GPP Rel-15 um-brella, and now work has started full steam to refine and enhance the feature set towards the so-called 5G phase 2 (Rel-16) and the 5G Long-Term-Evolution (Rel-17 and onwards).

vendors, research centres, operators, universities and customers from around the world.

We call it our open innovation model and collab-orative projects such as Speed-5G are an impor-tant part of this.

The main results of the Speed-5G project are techniques to improve the utility of spectrum, and this is critical to enabling 5G services be-cause spectrum is the very fuel of mobile net-works. It is a good example of why working to-gether is so important.

We’ve put together an exciting agenda consisting of presentations from Speed-5G and some guest projects, together with two demonstrations and a panel session. I hope that you will find the day both interesting and informative.

In parallel, regulatory work is further proceeding in preparation for the World Radiocommunica-tion Conference to be held in Q4/2019, which will finally decide on what will be the additional mmWave bands to be used for wireless access, up to the 90GHz range.

Considering all the above and that legacy sup-port is a must for all wireless terminals and net-works, the management of the whole set of lega-cy and newly available bands is becoming more and more a key factor in an effective deployment of 5G and 5G+ networks. This workshop there-fore will share with the audience some of the key findings coming from different relevant EU-funded research projects which to address the 5G/5G+ spectrum management challenge.

Professor Tim Whitley

MD Research & Innovation and Adastral Park

BT

Agenda

10:00 – 10:10 Welcome and run-through of day – Michael Fitch, BT

10:10 – 10:40 Keynote – Jonathan Legh-Smith, head of partnerships and strategic research, BT

10:40 – 11:00 SPEED-5G overview and main technical achievements – Klaus Moessner, University of Surrey

11:00 – 11:15 What demos are we showing and why – Panagiotis Demestichas, WINGS

11:15 – 11:45 Speed-5G MAC innovations – Benoit Miscopein, CEA-Leti

11:45 – 13:00 Opportunity to see the demos while having buffet lunch

13:00 – 13:30 Speed-5G RRM innovations – Andreas Georgakopoulos, WINGS

13:30 – 14:30 Talks from other projects

• 5G-MiEdge – Valerio Frascolla, Intel

• 5G-MoNArch – Simon Fletcher, Real Wireless

• 5G-Xcast – Rory Turnbull, BT

14:30 – 15:00 Coffee and further opportunity to see demos

15:00 – 15:45 Panel session – Spectrum management in 5G+ networks

15:45 – 16:00 Wrap-up and close

From 9:30 till 16:00 live demonstrations will be available in dedicated rooms for interested participants, running in parallel to the presentations held in the lecture room.

Panel session – Spectrum management in 5G+ networks

The core question for the panel session will be:

“What are the regulatory and operational chal-lenges of deploying dynamic spectrum access?”

The audience will be encouraged to interact with each other and the panel in a lively and open discussion. It is expected that the discussion could include topics such as the timing into 5G

phases and beyond, technology neutrality, inter-ference protection, spectrum management and utility, flexible RATs and QoS/ QoE management.

Panel members have been invited from Ofcom, research centres, operators and vendors.

Other projects presented in the workshopSPEED-5G project summary

5G-MiEdge

The aim of 5G-MiEdge is to develop an enhanced 5G architecture that combines mmWave access and backhaul with Multi-Access Edge Computing to enable eMBB services and mission critical low-latency applications. To achieve that goal 5G-MiEdge will develop an ultra-lean and interoper-able control signalling called liquid RAN Control-plane, which is capable of providing ubiquitous liquid allocation of communication and compu-tation resources in a user- and application-cen-tric way.

https://5g-miedge.eu

5G-MoNarch

5G-MoNArch brings 5G mobile network architec-ture concepts to practice. The project addresses the diversity of services, applications and use cases with dedicated innovations, making the flexible, adaptable and programmable network architecture actually usable. The project results will be implemented and shown in real-world testbeds.

https://5g-monarch.eu

5G-Xcast

5G-Xcast will devise, assess and demonstrate a novel and forward-looking 5G network architec-ture for large scale media delivery. The project will develop broadcast and multicast point to multi-point (PTM) capabilities, design an adapt-able 5G network architecture to dynamically switch between unicast and PTM modes along with demonstrations of the key innovations.

http://5g-xcast.eu

5G promises to deliver throughput and capacity, together with ultra-low latency and reliability, at levels that allow the introduction of hitherto un-seen services. At the operational level, 5G sys-tems are expected to support: 1,000 times high-er mobile data volume per geographical area, 10 to 100 times higher number of connected devic-es, and 10 to 100 times higher typical user data rate, and a host of other requirements on latency, energy-efficiency, device density etc.

The SPEED-5G approach

It will take a multipronged approach to achieve these targets: allocation of new spectrum bands (including in the mmWave range), integration of multiple RATs (Radio Access Technology) for effi-cient utilization of heterogeneous resources as well as reduction of cell size and densification of cells will all contribute their share to achieve these increases. The Speed-5G project has tack-led the capacity challenge through tight integra-tion of different RATs at MAC-layer, spectrum sharing and a much more dynamic use of spec-

trum and radio resources, leading to significant efficiencies and higher capacity.

The Speed-5G project has defined and evaluated the eDSA (enhanced Dynamic Spectrum Access) approach based on novel solutions for resource aggregation, sharing and dynamic allocation of spectrum and radio resource management, i.e. the hierarchical RRM approach. The introduction of different levels of resource management, oper-ating at different time-scales as well as the strati-fication of the traditional MAC layer, as intro-duced by Speed-5G, enable support of use-case and application-specific optimization of the radio resources.

A new MAC/RRM framework including new fea-tures has been designed and evaluated, and is being demonstrated in today’s event. Demon-strations also showcase advanced/high-capacity backhaul solutions that enable the realisation of a high-capacity EtE system. The demonstrations underline the real-world feasibility of the ap-proach proposed by Speed-5G.

SPEED-5G project website: https://speed-5g.eu

SPEED-5G public deliverables: https://speed-5g.eu/publications/public-deliverables

Demo 1: Combination of centralised and decentralized radio resource management with a novel MAC protocol for higher capacity in small cells

This demo shows how the SPEED-5G outcomes can be implemented to optimize the usage of spectrum resources and deliver the best QoS in dense heterogeneous networks in order. The de-mo relies on the hierarchical RRM framework which mixes both distributed and centralized RRM agents (dRRM and cRRM, respectively) and two multi-RAT small cells. Depending on the traf-fic load, the dRRM agent of a small cell may de-cide to offload some traffic on a channel of the 5 GHz unlicensed band, and it notifies the cRRM agent about this decision. In order to avoid inter-ference on the 5 GHz band, cRRM provides the other cell with a spectrum mask which prevents it from transmitting on the same channel. In this

demo, the second cell implements a novel MAC protocol based on post-LTE waveform, which is capable of autonomously selecting the least in-terfered channel on the 5GHz band. Relying on a mandatory listen-before-talk procedure and a channel selection based on reinforcement learn-ing, this MAC protocol is able to apply the guide-line of the cRRM and determine the best possible channel to transmit data to UEs, avoiding inter-ference from other coexisting systems like WiFi access points and stations. The demo is com-pleted by an advanced point-to-multi point back-haul solution aggregating the small cells and providing connectivity to a video streaming server offering OTT video to potential clients on the ac-cess side.

Demo 2: Exploitation of heterogeneous spectrum resources through tight integration of multiple RATs at MAC layer

In order to efficiently exploit heterogeneous spec-trum resources, a tighter integration of multiple RATs such as LTE, WiFi, and the new 5G NR that allows efficient use of licensed, unlicensed and lightly-licensed resources, is required. In the en-hanced dynamic spectrum access (eDSA) frame-work, proposed in SPEEd-5G, a tighter integra-tion of multiple RATs is accomplished at the MAC level, based on a MAC-level split, where the MAC layer is divided into two sub-layers, namely, high-er MAC (HMAC) and lower MAC (LMAC). The HMAC and layers above are common to all RATs, and the HMAC supports new functional modules for inter-RAT resource scheduling at MAC level, whilst there are separate LMAC and PHY entities corresponding to each RAT.

The objective of this demonstration is to highlight project innovations related to inter-RAT, e.g. LTE and WiFi, resource aggregation and traffic steer-ing/offload, based on a MAC-split solution. The results of aggregation based on MAC-split will al-so be compared with 3GPP legacy LWA imple-mentations, which are used as benchmarks. The demo setup represents a collocated scenario where common LTE EPC is connected to a single PC hosting LTE and WiFi via a switch. On the small-cell side, for LTE, an extension of OpenAir-Interface (OAI) is adopted with USRP providing RF interface while COTs WiFi AP is used for pro-viding the corresponding RF interface. On the UE side, a dual-interface terminal is emulated using NI Chassis hosting the extended OAI protocol stack and COTs WiFi device.

SPEED-5G Project Partners

AcknowledgementThe SPEED-5G project is funded by the European Commis-sion under Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, grant agreement number 671705.

University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Eurescom GmbH, Germany

BT Plc, United Kingdom

Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, France

Intel Mobile Communications GmbH, Germany

INTRACOM SA Telecom Solutions, Greece

Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Portugal

ROHDE & SCHWARZ GmbH & Co. KG, Germany

WINGS ICT Solutions, Greece

Contact

Project Coordinator: Klaus Moessner, University of SurreyProject Manager: Uwe Herzog, EurescomTechnical Coordinator: Seiamak Vahid, University of SurreyE-mail: contact@speed-5g.eu

Disclaimer

The SPEED-5G Consortium Parties do not warrant that the information contained in the brochure is capable of use, or that use of the information is free from risk, and accept no liability for loss or damage suffered by any person using the information. The European Commission has no direct or indirect responsibility for the contents of this brochure.

© 2018 SPEED-5G Consortium Parties