Second Look: End-to-end 5G testing for enhanced Mobile Broadband at 5GIC

5G research at the University of Surrey started with UK funding in 2012, with the dedicated 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) officially opened in 2015. It now counts more than 26 global industry partners and over 55 SMEs who are working alongside its academic researchers.As its founding director Prof Rahim Tafazolli says, "Probably we can claim we are the largest and oldest open innovation centre for 5G in the world".

Have published and patented technology for high capacity systems at 3.5GHz, together with beam forming technology and antenna design for 26GHz, conducted channel measurements for mmW bands, and created new modulation schemes and coding techniques, the centre is now developing these with lab tests and testbed trials.

In order to test, trial and optimise an end-to-end 5G system, it has built a complete carrier grade test bed, open enough for advanced research and innovation. Work started with LTE-A in TTD mode at 2.6GHz, with 44 cells indoor and outdoor and a core EPC platform. This has now been upgraded to a soft EPC and virtualised core platform based on distributed cloud architecture. Successful trials have already been completed for end-to-end NFV and SDN testing, as well as dynamic network slicing.

Whilst a huge amount of work has already been done on the eMBB aspect of 5G, the real differentiators are ultra reliability and low latency, and massive connectivity. These areas need a lot more research and standardisation  before we can say that 5G is ready.

Filmed at: 5G World, London, 15 June 2017

Produced and Filmed by: Gitte Daniels  –  Edited by: Gino Isaacs