5G-MoNArch: 5G Sea Port

Benefits for the targeted vertical industry/ies:

5G-MoNArch intends to improve the operation of the Hamburg port by leveraging the 5th Generation mobile wireless communication system (5G) technology to support various use cases or applications that are useful for the port’s operation. As the nature of these applications is quite different, the provided technology needs to provide support for service diversity. As the port operation would be severely harmed in case any of these applications did not work properly, the main requirements behind the various use case are:

Reliability: It is essential to provide a guaranteed network connection that maintains a good quality.

Resilience: It is also essential to guarantee availability all the time, even in the case of failures.

Specifically, the Smart Sea Port testbed incorporates the following three use cases, which will be deployed in the real operation of the Hamburg port:

Better traffic flow (ITS - Intelligent Transport Systems - and traffic light control): The testbed includes the control of all the traffic lights, which are connected to the central traffic control through the 5G mobile network with a dedicated slice.

Improved pollution control: The testbed includes mobile sensors on barges for emissions measurement. These are environmental sensors installed on HPA ships providing real time data on the current air quality. The sensors are connected through the 5G mobile network with a dedicated slice.

Enhanced maintenance experience: The testbed also includes Augmented Reality (AR) applications for the port’s engineering team connected via mobile broadband. Engineers can access construction plans and information for buildings and installations within the port area, using AR applications on tablets or goggles to simplify access to the data required on site. This equipment is connected to a central application server through the 5G mobile network, using again a dedicated slice.

5G capabilities and functionalities:

5G-MoNArch concept	Smart Port testbed
Network slicing	Resilient network slices are deployed for Hamburg port testbed. Pre-commercial equipment has been modified to support network slicing as well as to include resilient and reliable network functions. Based on the work conducted in WP2, fundamental aspects such as slice blue print and slice lifecycle management functions were designed and implemented.
Network Orchestration	5G-MoNArch provides orchestration and management platform and applies customised orchestration algorithms which are demonstrated in both testbeds. This allows flexible deployment of relevant Network Functions (NFs) across the network when needed and according to the network conditions.
Network resilience and reliability: RAN multi-connectivity	The URLLC slice type requires to fulfil high resilience and reliability requirements. Resilient and reliable network functions will be demonstrated in Smart Sea Port testbed. To reach this objective the testbed includes dual-connectivity implemented in the radio part and a fault management approach. Dual connectivity uses data duplication to increase link reliability with the objective to prevent service interruption during mobility events. This technique allows minimising the latency peaks which can be reduced to less than 1 ms in the envisioned implementation, as well as reducing packet loss during the handover. The multi-connectivity approach is illustrated in Figure 1‑2, i.e., it shows schematically two cells implemented in the Smart Sea Port testbed. When a mobile terminal starts moving in cell 1 towards the cell border, it will at some point in time add the second cell as a secondary base station (point 1). From this moment on, the mobile terminal is able to receive duplicated data via both base stations. As the mobile terminal moves closer to the second cell, the secondary base station will be at some point stronger than the master base station, target and source base station will change the roles (second cell will become new master cell and vice versa) and finally the mobile terminal will only be connected to the new master cell (point 2)
Network resilience and reliability: fault management	To improve resilience, a Fault Management (FM) approach is used. FM techniques identify, trouble shoot and isolate occurring network faults; this includes monitoring tools for the detection of changes, potential problems and anomalies in network behaviour, the root-cause analysis enabling the localisation of the actual problem, and problem isolation such that the propagation of the fault effects and impact to the rest of the network can be minimised.

About the 5G-MONARCH trial/pilot:

By the successful setup of the Smart Seaport testbed describe above, several functional requirements on the 5G MoNArch network architecture have already been verified: The network architecture is technically feasible, and its capability to support heterogeneous applications by specifically designed network slices has proved to be beneficial for the three exemplary use cases.

Aside of these functional aspects, performance aspects have been evaluated experimentally at the Smart Seaport testbed. Network slicing allows to use slice-specific implementations of network functions and to place network functions in slice-specific locations. The benefits of such measures have been assessed and demonstrated by latency measurements. Furthermore, protection of a critical application over other non-critical applications by traffic separation has been demonstrated by measuring latency in the presence of varying traffic load of the non-critical application.

Vertical Partners involved: Hamburg Port Authority

Also involved: NOKIA, Deutsche Telekom AG, Samsung Electronics Ltd

Other partners: ATOS SE, CEA LETI, Centre for Research & Technology Hellas, Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH, Mobics Ltd, Nokia Bell Labs France, Nokia Solutions and Networks Management International GmbH, Nomor Research, Real Wireless, Telecom Italia, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, University of Kaiserslautern

Showcases: Demos at ICT2018 5G PPP Stand 5G In Action; Mobile World Congress 2019 at the 5G Infrastructure Association Stand

5G-MONARCH Website | @5G_monarch

5G-MoNArch: 5G Smart Sea Port

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