Berlin Platform. In its current state, it consists of outdoor and indoor 5G cellular equipment from various vendors utilizing mainly the Private network spectrum 3.7 to 3.8 GHz band n78. Indoor coverage includes a distributed MIMO cell installation from Huawei and Nokia covering the entire underground parking deck, which is also used by other departments for autonomous driving activities. Another Nokia Macro cell is located on the roof to provide outdoor coverage in the vicinity of the building. Throughout the laboratory floor, Huawei micro remote radio heads are installed providing coverage to the lab environment. In addition to the “big” vendor RAN we also have SDR based gNodeB from Amarisoft and ETTUS USRP supporting OpenAir and srsRAN software stacks. To cover O-RAN use cases, the USRP based setups can be used in addition to small cells from NodeH. The networks are configured as 5G SA with Slicing and RAN Sharing enabled to support multiple core networks at the same time. As core network the Fraunhofer FOKUS developed Opene5GCore is used most of the time. Open5GCore supports very flexible NF deployment models that range from classic all-on-one cloud models to very distributed setups, which include multiple UPF at various network locations. The Standard 3GPPP interfaces are exposed due to the modular design of the Open5GCore, thus experimenters can access or intercept these interfaces. However, other (open source) cores are also available and can be activated for specific PLMN (MCC/MNC). The Playground basically operates multiple standalone Operators, each with its own pool of sim cards, which can be produced on demand. For the UE side, the playground has mobile phones from several vendors interconnected to multiple indoor locations and accessible via ADB remote control software. In addition to the consumer mobile phones embedded modem M.2 cards and CPE Devices are available. In addition to the fixed installed RAN components, so-called Nomadic Nodes are available. These refrigerator-sized mobile racks include compute, network, and storage resources together with RAN equipment from Nokia or Huawei and power supplies. These Nodes can be used to implement and validate nomadic ad-hoc private network scenarios. From the infrastructure side, the playground components are interconnected with operator grade 100 Gbit switches that operate in a redundant leaf-spine architecture. Dedicated Isolated network setups can be created by management software and further delegated to indiv...
Berlin Platform. Fraunhofer FOKUS operates the 5G Playground in its location in Berlin. The Playground is used in multiple Projects to implement and validate various use cases for 5G and upcoming 6G. It is also used for the implementation of the Open5GCore Platform. The Playground has a long history in the mobile communication field and has constantly evolved from older technologies like 3G and 4G.
