# Revisiting Testbed Architecture: The Growing Importance of Blueprints SLICES-RI Yet another research infrastructure?

Damien Saucez

► To cite this version:

Damien Saucez. Revisiting Testbed Architecture: The Growing Importance of Blueprints SLICES-RI Yet another research infrastructure?. Journées IA et Infrastructures, Dec 2025, Palaiseau, France. .
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Submitted on 26 Jan 2026

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# Revisiting Testbed Architecture: The Growing Importance of Blueprints

Damien Saucez

on behalf of the SLICES community

12/16/2025

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core

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edge

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RAN

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# Yet another research infrastructure?

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At the origin of blueprints

* To be truly effective, a research infrastructures must

* community-specific needs

* hardware, software, regulation

* respect universal scientific practices

* reproducibility, data management (FAIR)

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# The blueprint concept in a nutshell

* Help collaboration between engineers and non-engineers to work together on developing applications.

* Define a common terminology that doesn't require in-depth, technical knowledge

* to produce consistent vision on the application with a focus on the future objective.

* Pick up the right resources, be iterative, review and validate, and keep it as a baseline.

* Adapted from [0a, 0b] slices

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# The case of the Post5G-blueprint
## What for?

* Vertical service integration and testing (e.g., LiDAR)

* Software Defined Networking (e.g., xAPP)

* Radio/network development software (e.g., custom PHY)

* Low-level access to radio resources (e.g., THz)

* Joint use of post-5G infrastructure and HPC resources (e.g., digital twin, code generation, fuzzing)

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# The case of the Post5G-blueprint
## What for?

* Vertical service integration and testing (e.g., LiDAR)

Repeatability (Same team, same experimental setup)

Reproducibility (Different team, same experimental setup)

Replicability (Different team, different experimental setup)

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Experiment at the center

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Experiment at the center

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Experiment at the center

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Experiment at the center

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Experiment at the center

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## Documented and with reference implementation

* Concepts fully documented

* Reference implementation:

* Terraform (AWS/GCP/OpenStack) + Ansible for deployments

* k8s

* OAI

* Software and/or hardware

* USRP/AW2S

* Tofino/Tofino2 with SD-Fabric

* Complete documentation and SLICES academy integration
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# Documents and with reference

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# Equipment offered at SLICES-sites

* Radios at different sites (indoor, outdoor, anechoic chambers)

* Benetel RAN550 indoor n77 O-RU, Benetel RAN650 outdoor n78 O-RU

* LITEON FR1, band N78, 4x4 MIMO, 100MHz bandwidth

* LITEON Flexfi FR2

* AW2S jaguar and panther

* Multiple UEs at all the sites (Quectel (eMBB, RedCap) and Smartphones)

* Programmable radios in most sites: USRP b210, n300, n320, x410

* GPU and DPU-enabled baremetal access to last generation (performance oriented) AMD and Intel servers

* General compute resources, k8s clusters, VM hosting (> 3,000 cores, > 3 TB RAM)

* Most sites offer PTP G.8275.1 and G.8275.2 Telecom Profiles (10 Gbps, 25 Gbps, 100 Gbps)

* Cisco Nexus N9K & Fibrolan Falcon

* NAS Storage (~500TB): persistent + scratch

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# Lessons learned – HW is a real constraint

* O-RAN Open FHI in OpenAirInterface

* Optimized for Intel-based x86-64 (e.g., AVX512)

* How to move to AMD and ARM?

* Complexity in network infrastructure

* Raw Ethernet

* Usually 3 VLAN (need sr-iov): management, control/user plane

* PTP distribution and PTP HW time stamping on NICs

* ... software too, doomed by dependencies!

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# Lessons learned – Diversity (1/2)

* On-prem

* Full

* Core/RAN split

* Public cloud aided

* In existing testbeds

* TUM, IMEC, G5K

* With non-SLICES member: Amarisoft RAN

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Lessons learned – Diversity (2/2)

* Network interconnect

* Commercial Internet accessible

* Dedicated links

* VPN service

* Identification / Authentication

* Users based on the light federation from SLICES (OIDC) is ok

* PKIs... how to unify certificates

* People test first in virtual environments (must support VM)

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# Roadmap (->2026)

* Seed ->| 06/2022

* PoC ->| 06/2023

* First deployments ->| 12/2023

* First deployment with non-SLICES member 04/2024

* 1st hackathon ->| (062024 at IFIP Networking)

* 1st code sprint ->| (06/2024 @ Sophia)

* **Pre-operation** ->| 11/11/2024

* 2nd code sprint ->| (01/2025 @ Volos)

* 2nd hackathon ->| (06/2025 @ IFIP Networking)

* 3rd code sprint ->| (01/2026 @ Genoa)

* BP v3 -> 02/2026

* Operation -> (06/2026)

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# Roadmap (->2026)

* Seed ->| 06/2022

* PoC ->| 06/2023

* First deployments ->| 12/2023

* First deployment with non-SLICES member 04/2024

* 1st hackathon ->| (062024 at IFIP Networking)

* 1st code sprint ->| (06/2024 @ Sophia)

* **Pre-operation** ->| 11/11/2024

* 2nd code sprint ->| (01/2025 @ Volos)

* 2nd hackathon ->| (06/2025 @ IFIP Networking)

* 3rd code sprint ->| (01/2026 @ Genoa)

* BP v3 -> 02/2026

* Operation -> (06/2026)

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# Not only Post-5G!

* Already in Pre-op:

* Post-5G blueprint

* https://doc.slices-ri.eu/BlueprintServices/beyond5G/beyond5G.html

* Federated Learning Blueprint

* https://doc.slices-ri.eu/BlueprintServices/FederatedLearning/federatedlearning.html

* Machine Learning Blueprint

* https://doc.slices-ri.eu/BasicServices/MachineLearning/jupyter/index.html

* Work in progress

* Cloud-edge continuum, quantum networking...

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## 5G key principles [1]

* Separate the User Plane functions from the Control Plane functions

* Modularize the function design

* Define the set of interactions between network functions as services

* Enable direct interactions between network functions

* Minimize dependencies between the Access Network and the Core Network

* Support "stateless" NFs (i.e., compute decoupled from storage)

* Support capability exposure

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