Keysight Technologies announced the company was the only test, measurement and network visibility company to be selected to play a key role in a new European (EU) project: 5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI), intended to accelerate the acceptance of 5G across Europe. The project comprises 23 partners, including major telecom operators, industry vendors and academia.

5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI) is a pan-European research and innovation project financed by the EU's Horizon 2020 program. 5G-VINNI will facilitate the uptake of 5G in Europe by providing an end-to-end facility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies and explores solutions for vertical industries, such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, automotive and media and entertainment.

Keysight will contribute its expertise and capabilities in network test and measurement, essential to deploying 5G networks and services. The company's solutions will be used in trials of prototype technologies. The project will also benefit from Keysight's contributions in test case development, which will run on the test networks.

The €20 million project will be coordinated by Telenor Group, the international telecom operator headquartered in Norway. The project, scheduled to run for three years, will leverage the latest 5G technologies, including results from previous 5G PPP phases, and will employ advanced network virtualization, slicing, radio and core technologies. A rigorous automated testing campaign will also be employed to validate 5G under various combinations of technologies and network loads.

5G-VINNI will run at four main sites, located in Norway, the U.K., Spain and Greece. Experimental sites will be established in Germany and Portugal. Open APIs will be provided to ensure easy access to the 5G-VINNI facility.

Objectives

The 5G-VINNI objectives are:

• 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 end-to-end trials 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.

Members of 5G-VINNI are: Telenor Group (Telenor Research, Telenor Norway and Telenor Satellite), British Telecom (U.K.), Telefonica (Spain), SES (Lux), Huawei (Norway and Germany), Ericsson (Norway), Nokia (Norway), Samsung (U.K.), Intracom (Greece), Keysight (Denmark), Cisco (Norway), Alticelabs (Portugal), Engineering (Italy), AUEB (Greece), UC2M (Spain), Simula (Norway), Uni.Patras (Greece), Fraunhofer FOKUS (Germany), EANTC (Germany), Limemicro (U.K.), SRS (IR), and Eurescom (Germany).

"We are looking forward to contributing our 5G expertise and technology to another 5G project in support of 5G deployment across Europe. 5G-VINNI's selection of Keysight as a project member is testament to our long-standing close collaborations with 5G market leaders." — Daniel Thomasson, vice president of Keysight Laboratories

 

"We are excited to join 5G-VINNI and contribute with Keysight's scalable, software-based end-to-end 5G design test capabilities. Our ultimate goal is that the entire mobile ecosystem will realize the full potential of 5G technology across a wide range of applications and devices." — Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager of Keysight's Wireless Devices and Operators group