PLATFORM LEADER

Prof. Pedro Merino

COUNTRY/COUNTRIES

Spain

Short Description

Victoria Network (Malaga Platform) includes a wide variety of mobile networks and other technologies situated across various physical locations, but with a clear centralized control post in the Ada Byron building on the University of Malaga (UMA) campus. An overview of the Network is depicted in the next figure.

Key assets in the current infrastructure

• Radio Access Network (RAN)

University Campus:

– Nokia AirScale BBU managing the following set of Nokia RRHs:

Outdoor:

• x10 Nokia microRRHs in FR1 (bands b7 and n78). Four of them are configured for 5G SA in band 78, and the rest act as eNB in b7 for 5G NSA.

• x2 Nokia mmWave FR2 (bands n258 and n261), which are configured for 5G NSA operation using two of the Nokia microRRHs as eNB in lower frequency.

Indoor:

• x2 Nokia picoRRH in FR1 (band 78).

– O-RAN solutions based on:

• RUs: Benetel RAN550 (band n78) for indoor use cases and Benetel RAN650 (band n77u) to provide outdoor coverage.

• DU/CU: Docker-based solution from IS-Wireless.

• Near RT-RIC: Provided also by IS-Wireless, including xApps for KPI monitoring and Slicing.

Other RAN locations linked to Ada Byron through MOCN split. These deployments are managed by Telefonica, and are focused on experimentation in real scenarios:

• Malaga City Center

• Malaga Harbor

• Torremolinos

• 5G Cores: Polaris 5GC Unicorn and Open5GS.

• Keysight Hardware and Software tools from Testing & Monitoring portfolio.

• Telemetry and UPF P4 modules for deterministic communications.

• Endpoints such as UGV, UAV and XR devices.

• Commercial NTN solution offered by Starlink.

• Equipment to create and provision SIM cards.

Services currently offered by the infrastructure

• Intranet: It provides Telefonica coverage to experimenters from any location in Spain through a direct connection to Ada Byron building.

• Digital Twins: Network Digital Twins of some of the 5G deployments in Ada Byron.

• Testing full services with virtualization and slicing in an end-to-end 4G/5G environment.

• Automation of experiments with local and remote access.

• Support for multidisciplinary research, with special support for connected cars and PPDR, but open to any vertical or multidisciplinary research.

6G-SANDBOX extensions and new features

All locations are already evolving and will be further enhanced in the context of 6G-SANDBOX. Victoria Network will be enhanced with all the software components developed in 6G-SANDBOX to create the trial networks and extend current network digital twins (i.e., the components that will be hosted in the 6G Library) and will integrate 6G components at the physical infrastructure layer that are related to:

• University campus RAN extension and new RAN locations such as La Mayora and Malaga TechPark.

• Reconfigurable Intelligence Surfaces.

• More disaggregated RAN solutions (O-RAN) with the related SW and HW emulation components of Keysight.

• Integration of fixed/RAN and NTN with EDGE/MEC, and use of OneWeb satellite mobile backhaul, in addition to the existing Starlink.

• Improve Deterministic networking using P4 language with Intel Tofino 2 switches.

• Features to support extended reality and haptic communications.