NGNI | 5G Playground

The 5G Playground: Be part of the 5G Evolution

The Fraunhofer FOKUS 5G Playground was established in 2015 and represents a pioneering state of the art 5G testbed to perform applied research and development (inspired by the FOKUS motto "demo or die“) for gaining hands on experiences with the major relevant 5G technologies. In contrast to vendor or operator specific closed testbeds, the 5G Playground is an open testbed, primarily based on the extensible FOKUS OpenXYZ toolkits, which are implementing the most important emerging technology standards related to a 5G system. The main focus is on providing a higly customizable software-based core and applications platform, distributed across several data centers, supporting in particular edge computing and network slicing in a multi-access network environment. Radio access technologies include WiFi, 4G, NB-IOT and soon also emerging 5G NR.

The 5G playground is designed to enable innovative product prototyping in a realistic, comprehensive 5G end-to-end environment, including calibration, benchmarking and interoperability tests between new prototypes and products. For this purpose, the testbed infrastructure can be flexibly augmented by infrastructure, network and service components from third parties.

While the 5G Playground represents a specific configuration of the OpenXYZ toolkits within the Fraunhofer FOKUS premises (testbed as a service concept), it can also be established at potential partner and customer sites (testbed to go concept). Thus this playground concept enables the deployment of customized testbeds for proof-of concept as well as for performance, security and reliability evaluations into the different network areas. For addressing the highly diverse requirements coming from the different verticals of the 5G domain, the 5G Playground features a set of customized functions as basis for different dedicated slices for:

Edge Computing & Network Slicing
Localized services and multimedia for automotive
Low delay and reliability for wireless industrial communication
High availability for critical infrastructures
Security and privacy for dedicated networks
Usage of satellite networks for backhauling

A specific configuration of the 5G Playground represents the 5G ready trial platform, which supports a dedicated 5G / edge computing service platform for prototyping IOT applications in Berlin.

Furthermore, the 5G Playground is part of the Fraunhofer 5G Berlin testbed, which integrates the Fraunhofer FOKUS 5G playground with the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute 5G testbeds.