Experimentation network at Oulu University (branded 5GTN) is deployed at the Linnanmaa campus (outdoor/Indoor) and local university hospital TestLab (indoor). It includes commercial and experimentational components and is constantly evolving.
Outdoor Service
Outdoor coverage at Linnanmaa campus for 4G and 5G is provided from two roof-top installations. Picture below illustrates the main coverage sectors for 5G (n78/60MHz) and one snapshot coverage measurement example from summer 2022. Two cells at Tietotalo rooftop provide coverage towards south and north and one sector from the second site towards north. All 5G radios are connected with standalone (SA) architecture. N77/100MHz outdoor installations are expected during 2h/2024.
Note. 4G MBB (B7/ B40) and NB-IOT (B28) coverage not shown.
Indoor Service
Macro BTS installations outdoor are providing access also indoors, but indoor coverage is provided also with dedicated indoor equipment. 5G and 4G small-cells inside Linnanmaa campus is offered in four different locations in Linnanmaa – two social meeting areas and two functional laboratories. These locations include Tellus, Agora, Fablab and OAMK Robotics lab.
mmWave coverage is offered indoors with one radio equipment at Tietotalo 2nd lobby area.
Project-specific Isolated Installations
Large-scale installations above are complemented by two alternatives for a standalone 5G network for project specific needs.
Assets are based on open-source implementation (OAI – Open-Air-Interface):
- USRP HW for SW-defined radios <6GHz connected to OAIBOX (oaibox.com) small-scale full network in-a-box. This solution supports SA and O-RAN alternatives.
- Open5GS with either USRP radios or with commercial radios. This is particularly for core impacting research and European-wide federation activities.
Run-time environment for Services
EDGE Processing, storing and routing capacity is available from local data center as run-time environment for running the analytics and services.
Local core equipment room includes a stack of DELL r730 servers for hosting services close to Radio access points. This is targeted for serving needs from edge-processing relevant research as well as serving as a generic run-time environment for back-end services and data analytics. Option for GPU processing is also offered from local data center. We are also building 100TB data storage for supporting data storage needs.
Federation and Remote use
Work is ongoing on SLICES-SC project in which 5GTN is linked into a European cluster of testbeds. It is a research infrastructure cluster whose objective is to harmonise the use and sharing of resources, knowledge, and technology to users regardless of their location. Part of 5GTN assets are available through federation portal for remote use.
Performance Monitoring
Two main network monitoring and measurement solutions are
1) Keysight NEMO for radio i/f measurements. Solution includes NEMO handy for handset and NEMO outdoor for laptop. Additionally solution includes analyser tool for results post-processing and visualization.
2) Kaitotek Qosium for measuring network QoE. Includes measurement probes and back-end server solution for managing the measurements