An Open 5G NFV Platform for Smart City Applications Using Network Softwarization

Abstract

Advanced wireless communication network testbeds are now widely being deployed around European and cross-continental. This represents an interesting opportunity for vertical industry and academia to perform experimentation and validation before a real deployment. In this paper, we present 5GinFIRE as a suitably flexible platform towards open 5G (Network Function Virtualization (NFV) ecosystem and playground. On top of this platform, we designed and deployed a smart city safety system as a vertical use case, exploring 5G capabilities through a combination of NFV and machine learning to provide end-to-end communication and low latency smart city service. This safety system helps detecting criminals along the city and sending a notification to the security center. A Virtual Network Function (VNF) has been developed to enable video transcoding, face detection and recognition at the cloud or the edge of the network. The validation of the overall system is performed through the deployment of the use case indoor (Smart Internet Lab) and outdoor (Millennium Square Bristol). We show the VNF specification and present a quantitative analysis in terms of bandwidth, response time, processing time and transmission speed in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE).