The 5GinFIRE platform A testbed for end-to-end 5G experimentation Christos Tranoris, Spyros Denazis University of Patras Patras, Greece tranoris@ece.upatras.gr, sdean@upatras.gr Anastasius Gavras, Halid Hrasnica Eurescom GmbH Heidelberg, Germany gavras@eurescom.eu, hrasnica@eurescom.eu Abstract — 5G is the next generation networking infrastructure with a strong focus on requirements of various vertical domains. 5G brings improvements on networking performance but also introduces new services for deploying software involving networking aspects in an end-to-end manner from the edge to the cloud. 5GinFIRE is an EU H2020 project that builds and operates an Open 5G NFV based reference ecosystem of experimental facilities. It enables 5G NFV-based architectures for vertical industries’ applications and facilitates experimentation. Keywords—5G; experimentation; NFV; MANO; I. INTRODUCTION The 5G system has the ambition of responding to the widest range of services and applications in the history of mobile and wireless communications [1]. Addressing the question of how a platform can host and integrate verticals and concurrently deal with reconciling their competing and opposing requirements, requires operational 5G infrastructures that can host various vertical industries’ applications. A key issue is the lifecycle management of the verticals’ services by means of Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) deployment and programmability techniques. The technical objective of 5GINFIRE is to build and operate an Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based reference ecosystem of experimental facilities that lays down the foundations of a standards-based network substrate for instantiating fully softwarised architectures for vertical industries purposes. II. ARCHITECTURE AND IMPLEMENTATION A. Use cases and requirements 5GINFIRE (https://5ginfire.eu/) derives its requirements from a set of simple use cases that are positioned in the areas of the automotive vertical sector and smart cities. The use cases are used as source of requirements for building the infrastructure and to showcase its capabilities. In the automotive case the requirements are extracted from scenarios such as sensing-based and video-camera-based assisted driving, which use a multitude of information sources (intra- vehicle, as well as inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure) to enable assisted driving. In the smart cities case the requirements are derived from the scenarios to facilitate the use and exploitation of available open data provided by existing sensor deployments in cities, as well as interfacing with the capabilities of the existing deployments of sensor functionality in the testbeds of the project partners in Bristol (U.K.), Aveiro (Portugal) in Europe and São Paulo and Uberlândia in Brazil. B. Arhitecture Fig. 1 illustrates the 5GINFIRE conceptual architecture derived from the ETSI NFV reference architecture [2] and upstream open source projects. It depicts the major architectural areas and shows in a workflow manner the various interactions. Although not exhaustive, the conceptual architecture highlights the functionality that is required to integrate existing open source components and physical infrastructures or being developed by the project. It provides an indication on how the required architectural and technological convergence with mainstream industrial and open source activities could be achieved. In Fig. 1 an application is composed of services that are configured to offer this application. These services are further decomposed into virtual networking and vertical functions (VxFs) that are deployed at the corresponding points of presence in the infrastructure. A use case from the automotive vertical is used to validate the platform. Following similar practices more types of virtual experimentation environments may be instantiated. The 5GINFIRE middleware communicates with the endpoints of the orchestration services that are responsible for orchestrating the man