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Experimentation network at the University of Oulu

Experimentation network at the University of Oulu, also known as 5G Test Network, or 5GTN for short, is s federated with SLICES-RI.

The Test Network is deployed at the Linnanmaa campus (outdoor/indoor) and local university hospital TestLab (indoor).  The  constantly evolving test network includes commercial and experimentational components.

5G Test Network is a key component of the 6G Flagship initiative. The whole Test Network is available for testing locally, and part of the network can be used remotely.

Test Network Architecture

Local access

The full Experimentation network is available for local testing. Part of the network is federated with SLICES-RI, and can also be accessed remotely.

Outdoor coverage

Outdoor coverage at Linnanmaa campus for 4G and 5G is provided from two roof-top installations. These two cells provide coverage towards south and north and one sector from the second site towards north. All 5G radios are connected with standalone (SA) architecture. 

Indoor coverage

Macro BTS installations outdoor are providing access also indoors, but indoor coverage is provided also with dedicated indoor equipment. 5G and 4G small-cells inside Linnanmaa campus is offered in four different locations in Linnanmaa – two social meeting areas and two functional laboratories. These locations include Tellus, Agora, Fablab and OAMK Robotics lab. MmWave coverage is offered indoors with one radio equipment at Tietotalo 2nd lobby area.

Network federation and remote use

Work is ongoing on SLICES-SC project in which 5GTN is linked into a European cluster of testbeds. It is a research infrastructure cluster whose objective is to harmonise the use and sharing of resources, knowledge, and technology to users regardless of their location. Part of 5GTN assets are available through federation portal for remote use:

  • FR1 O-RAN federated
  • Allbesmart OAIBOX + Benetel FR1 RU
  • Also FR2 RIS being federated
  • 50TB local data storage
  • Datasets can be loaded to Slices Data Repository
Sign in via SLICES portal

Accessing 5G Test Network

  1. User authentication happens through Slices portal.
  2. User is directed from SLICES-RI to Allbesmart portal where login with SLICES-RI credentials is added.
  3. When user selects the SLICES-RI login, respective OAIBOX dashboard is opened.
Read the full OAIBOX guide
Acess the OIABOX testbed

Project-specific Isolated Installations

Large-scale installations above are complemented by two alternatives for a standalone 5G network for project specific needs.

Assets are based on open-source implementation (OAI – Open-Air-Interface):

  • USRP HW for SW-defined radios <6GHz connected to OAIBOX (oaibox.com) small-scale full network in-a-box. This solution supports SA and O-RAN alternatives.
  • Open5GS with either USRP radios or with commercial radios. This is particularly for core impacting research and European-wide federation activities.

Run-time environment for Services

EDGE Processing, storing and routing capacity is available from local data center as run-time environment for running the analytics and services.

Local core equipment room includes a stack of DELL r730 servers for hosting services close to Radio access points. This is targeted for serving needs from edge-processing relevant research as well as serving as a generic run-time environment for back-end services and data analytics. Option for GPU processing is also offered from local data center. We are also building 100TB data storage for supporting data storage needs.

Performance monitoring

Two main network monitoring and measurement solutions are:

  1. Keysight NEMO for radio i/f measurements. Solution includes NEMO handy for handset and NEMO outdoor for laptop. Additionally solution includes analyser tool for results post-processing and visualization.
  2. Kaitotek Qosium for measuring network QoE. Includes measurement probes and back-end server solution for managing the measurements