European Projects: 5G-VINNI

5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI) is a pan-European research and innovation project financed by the EU’s Horizon2020 programme. 5G-VINNI facilitates uptake of 5G in Europe by providing an end-to-end facility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies, and explore solutions for vertical industries such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, media and entertainment and automotive. The project is scheduled to run for three years at sites in Norway, UK, Spain, Greece, Germany and Portugal, and has a budget of 20 million euros. The 5G-VINNI strategy to achieve this involves:

• Design an advanced and accessible 5G end to end facility.
• Build several interworking sites of the 5G-VINNI end to end facility.
• Provide user friendly zero-touch orchestration, operations and management systems for the 5G-VINNI facility.
• Validate the 5G KPIs and support the execution of E2E trial of vertical use cases to prove the 5G-VINNI capabilities.
• Develop a viable business and ecosystem model to support the life of the 5G-VINNI facility during and beyond the span of the project.
• Demonstrate the value of 5G solutions to the 5G community particularly to relevant standards and open source communities with a view to securing widespread adoption of these solutions.

The 5G-VINNI E2E facility will demonstrate the achievement of 5G KPIs across a range of combinations and permutations of new 5G access technologies and end-user equipment types interconnected by the most advanced 5G core network technologies available. For this 5G-VINNI will leverage the latest 5G technologies, including results from previous 5G PPP projects.

This approach employs Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing and a rigorous automated testing campaign to validate the 5G KPIs under various combinations of technologies and network loads. To ensure realistic load scenarios 5G-VINNI will create and make available an openness framework to give verticals and peer projects easy access to the 5G-VINNI facilities, both legally and technically, e.g. via open APIs. The 5G-VINNI facilities include 7 infrastructure instances in nationally supported 5G nodes across Europe; this number may be expanded as the ICT-19 projects come on-line in 2019.