5G-VINNI - 5G Network Slicing for the Norwegian defence

Overview of the 5G-VINNI Network Slicing for the Norwegian defence Trial

5G-VINNI conducted a trial with the Norwegian Defence at its facility in Oslo in May 2020. A dedicated and fully isolated Network Slice was implemented for the Norwegian Defence using NSA 5G and DECOR. It successfully demonstrated how a user in the Military can obtain a different quality of service when connected to the Military Network Slice and the Commercial Network Slice. Advanced functionality was implemented in the slice such as Autonomous Edge Cloud, Security-as-a-Service and onboarding of third party applications such as voice, push-to-talk and other own-developed Military services. The trial focused on the slicing capability, QoS assignment, Security-as-a-Service and how services are auto-provisioned from an end-to-end orchestrator and how orchestration can be done across a central and edge cloud. A RAN site is deployed in the Military camp. This is a 3-sector site with gNBs in the 3.6GHz and 26GHz bands and eNB in 2.1GHz band. A satellite for redundant backhaul is also installed there. A customer application called Hermod provided by the Norwegian Defence onboared into the slice was successfully tested. The Hermod application is used by military-grade devices connected to the 5G slice to auto-discover each other and then establish direct communication between the devices.

The following network elements were used:

• NSA 5G Core by Ericsson.
• gNBs and eNBs by Ericsson and Huawei.
• Generic VNF Manager (G-VNFM) by Ericsson.
• NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) by Nokia - OpenStack and KVM, Nuage SDN, servers, switches, storage. 
• NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) by Nokia. 
• E2E Orchestrator by Nokia. 
• IMS by Metaswitch.
• Firewall and Security-as-a-Service by PaloAlto.
• Transport network by Telenor.

Three Non-standalone (NSA) and two Stand Alone (SA) slices are implemented in the 5G-VINNI Norway facility site: (i) NSA Defence Slice for URLLC, in this case dedicated for the Norwegian Defence. (ii) NSA Slice#1 is for eMBB and used by different customers. (iii) NSA Slice#2 is for mIOT and used by different customers. (iv) SA Slice#1 and #2 will be used by different customers. The trial illustrated how a defence user connects to the NSA Defence slice and to NSA Slice#1 for eMBB.

5G Empowerment

The key features brought by this 5G trial are:

• Dedicated network slice with full isolation for the Defence sector.
• Differentiated QoS for different Slices. 
• Orchestration of services across a distributed Cloud involving Edge and Central sites.
• Security-as-a-Service for the vertical customer, the Norwegian Defence in this case.
• End-to-end orchestration. 
• On boarding of customer applications into the slice.

5G Key Performance Indicators

The trial measured the following KPIs when connecting to the Military Network Slice:

• Downlink: 500Mbps.
• Uplink: 70 Mbps.

It measured the following KPIs when connecting to the commercial slice: 

• Downlink: 50Mbps.
• Uplink: 30 Mbps.

 The highest throughput achieved at this site with 5G using 80 MHz channel in the 3.6GHz band and 4G using 10 MHz channel in 2.1 GHz was also measured. 

Videos and Demos

A video on on the 5G-VINNI Norway Facility (August 2021) is available here. 

Accolades

One of the ten winners of the 2021 5G-IA Trials Working Group annual competition, featuring in the 5G Infrastructure PPP Brochure - Trials and Pilots. 

Use Case Data Summary

Location: Oslo, Norway

Dates: Q2-2020 

Partners involved: Norwegian Defence, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Telenor

EC funding reference: Horizon 2020; H2020-ICT-2018-1; ICT-17-2018 - 5G End-to-End Facility

Funding cycle: July 2018-December 2021

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