5G Picture

Description

5G-PICTURE will design and develop a next generation converged infrastructure integrating a variety of advanced wireless access network technologies through novel wireless, optical and packet network solutions. This infrastructure will interconnect a large number of “disaggregated” compute/storage and network elements and deploy the concepts of hardware programmability and network softwarisation to facilitate the Dis-Aggregated RAN approach. This will enable the provisioning of any service across the infrastructure by flexibly and efficiently mixing-and-matching network, compute and storage resources.

5G wireless access solutions will support a heterogeneous set of integrated air interfaces and will exploit contiguous and wide spectrum bandwidth including Sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands and advanced beam-tracking and MIMO techniques. These will coexist with legacy (2-3G), Long Term Evolution LTE (4G) and Wi-Fi technologies to allow broader coverage and availability, higher network density and increased mobility. To further enhance spectral efficiency and throughput, small cells can be deployed, either adopting the traditional Distributed Radio Access Network (D-RAN) paradigm, where Base Band Units (BBUs) and radio units are co-located, or the more recently proposed concept of Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). In this context, optical network solutions can play a key role offering advanced transport capabilities.

Estimated impact

5G-PICTURE proposes a paradigm shift, from the traditional RAN and recent C-RAN to the “Dis-Aggregated RAN” (DA-RAN) approach. DA-RAN is a novel concept adopting the notion of “disaggregation” of HW and SW components across the wireless, optical and compute/storage domains. “Resource disaggregation” allows decoupling of HW and SW components creating a common “pool of resources” that can be independently selected and allocated on demand. These HW and SW components form the basic set of building blocks that, in principle, can be independently combined to compose any infrastructure service. Apart from increased flexibility, disaggregation, due to its modular approach, offers enhanced scalability, upgradability and sustainability potential that are particularly relevant to 5G environments supporting enormous and continuously growing number of end-devices and services. To exploit the concept of disaggregation in RAN environments, novel 5G technology solutions are needed to increase the density and power efficiency of the “pool of resources”, supporting at the same time high bandwidth connectivity between them.