Focus Area 5G

The overall goal of the focus area 5G is to increase the awareness of 5G as an enabler to strengthen vertical integration of the 5G technology, to provide an understanding of the technological and societal sides of 5G, and to develop principles for appropriate, and secure configurations of 5G networks and beyond.         
The 5G FA focuses on getting partners involved in defining relevant business cases, and to provide guidance on what kind of critical services can be supported by 5G. This will be combined with the development and assessment of new mechanisms to enable and manage 5G as a carrier for all types of critical services, and studies of network configurations including slicing for 5G networks and beyond. One use case is management and configuration to enhance the survivability of critical services, e.g., in emergency situations.
5G will provide services for a wide variety of verticals with different service demands and requirements, ranging from overly critical to non-critical. In NORCICS, the research focus is on service with extreme performance and dependability requirements. In addition to performance and dependability requirements, it includes cybersecurity (also in OT safety systems). Topics that will be addressed to ensure that these extreme requirements are met include:

• Softwarized and virtualized networks provide the necessary flexibility, but introduce new management and operations challenges, such as network slicing management, including E2E resource configuration, considering (re)allocation, (soft)reservation, isolation.
• New technology and network architectures need to be studied, with open RAN (software radio) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which is a low latency enabler. Again resource (re)allocation is one of many challenges.
• New ecosystems with private 5G networks, interconnecting Non-Public 5G Networks, implies new external exposure of 5G core functions to 3rd parties, and the need for multi-vendor 5GC deployment.
• The increased societal focus and awareness on user centreed, sustainable, and ethical network services development must be considered for 5G networks too.

At NTNU, lab facilities for Beyond 5G research and testing have been established, that:

• Offer an open platform for B5G testing for research and industry.
• Provide a forum for discussions and scientific exchange in the B5G research area.
• Create awareness of B5G-related projects /proposals with external partners.
• Improve cooperation between researchers, groups, and projects.