MATILDA: 5G for Public Protection and Disaster Relief

5G context

5G technologies are bringing new capabilities with a strong potential for transforming public safety, such as new functionality and greater network management controls enabling new applications and enhanced response services. 

In this context, MATILDA has developed 5G pilot for Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) as an emergency infrastructure and service orchestration with SLA enforcement. The pilot is designed to deliver tailor-made services and applications supporting public safety teams in their day-to-day operations, as well as during extreme situations such as massive catastrophes.

Goals of the pilot

• The core scenario focuses on a suite of reliable and resilient services and applications with SLA enforcement on top of a 5G-enabled infrastructure. 

• On-site intervention monitoring alongside mobility and location tracking characteristics that can be used during various types and sizes of emergency operations. 

• Target KPIs: providing 1000x higher wireless area capacity; saving up to 90% energy per service creation time from 90 hours to 90 minutes; creating a secure, reliable and dependable internet. 

Architecture and Trial Overview

To drive innovations in public safety, this 5G PPDR pilot uses the three-layer MATILDA ecosystem:

• Development Environment and Marketplace supporting all pre-deployment steps of a 5G-enabled application through proper packaging and combining cloud-native components.

• 5G-ready Application Orchestrator layer that uses component-proxying to create a service mesh. These proxies constitute the data-plane and abstract network traffic management aspects, by performing tasks such as dynamic service discovery, load balancing, TLS termination, circuit breaking, health checking, traffic shaping (Layer 7), publication of metrics, among others.

• Programmable 5G Infrastructure Slicing and Management facilitating operational demands of service mesh handling and retrieving feedback from the infrastructure. This layer manages life cycles of the application graph deployment, acquiring network and computing resources as-a-service from the underlying blocks, managing network services that compose network slices and logical interconnectivity across geographically distributed points of presence.

• Solutions for industrial verticals, such as public safety: Police, fire. EMT services, and other mission-and-business-critical communications, such as ports, airports and utilities. 

Deployment 

• The 5G PPDR pilot is deployed on top of a 5G infrastructure managed by the MATILDA Vertical Application Orchestrator (VAO) and Operations Support System (OSS). 

• This is based on the implementation of 5G-enabled emergency response capabilities from the iMON product suite for real-time operational monitoring, extended with continuous performance monitoring engines of the qMON solution (as a VNF) for active and passive service level specification (SLS) monitoring and SLA enforcement.

• The 5G PPDR pilot is deployed and demonstrated on a 5G pioneering band (3.5 GHz and 700 MHz) in the MATILDA testbeds at CNIT (Genoa, Italy) and INTERNET INSTITUTE Ltd. (Ljubljana, Slovenia).

Outcomes and Impacts

This MATILDA pilot demonstrates disruptions in terms of: 

• Support for cloud-native deployment and dynamic adaptation of PPDR applications using MATILDA VAO and OSS. 

• Novel provisioning technologies for distributed applications in cloud-based and virtualised 5G environments for public safety. 

• Automation (MATILDA VAO and OSS) of set-up, deployment and scaling of PPDR services and 5G network slices for public safety. 

• Active and passive E2E monitoring and Quality of Service (QoS)/Quality of Experience (QoE) diagnostics for cloud-based and virtualised 5G environments. 

• Extension of MATILDA concepts to other critical communication use cases, e.g. utilities, private communications in airports, among others.

Key marketable innovations including services and products: 

• 5G-ready PPDR services for real-time operational monitoring and critical infrastructure protection designed for first responders and public safety agencies. 

• VNF-based and OSM controlled E2E monitoring engine for 5G environments supporting the collection of network and application KPIs.  

• iMON mobile and cloud-based application: cloud-ready application component for public safety operational monitoring (Technology Readiness Level 7) with mobile app. 

• qMON VNF: OSM 4/5 enabled virtual network function for active E2E networks and service measurements and monitoring  (Technology Readiness Level 7).

• qMON solution: quality monitoring and testing solution used by mobile, fixed and cloud providers for quality assurance of networks and applications (Technology Readiness Level 9).

Vertical partners involved: INTERNET INSTITUTE Ltd

Also involved: Consorzio nazionale interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni - CNIT (Coordinator),  UBITECH

Other Partners: Aalto University, Atos SA, BIBA - Bremer Institut fur Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Ericsson Telecomunicazioni SpA, COSMOTE AE, Orange Romania SA, Exxpertsystems GmbH, Incelligent, Italtel SpA, National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Suites Data Intelligence Solutions Ltd, University of Bristol, University of Pireus Research Centre

MATILDA Website | @matilda5g