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Use Cases

UC #3 Patras: Media Services provisioning in Railway Environment

The demonstration and performance evaluation of Media Services over various 5G network deployments tailored to the railway environment is in the focus of 5G-VICTORI in the context of two attractive and yet realistic scenarios of service provisioning not only statically at the train station but also in conditions of mobility while the train is on the move; a number of media service streams will be offered, potentially adding up to Gb data rates for 200-300 passengers boarding a train in real environment.

The main objective of this UC is to demonstrate efficient provisioning of eMBB-type, downstream services in trains for infotainment purposes, as well as delivery of upstream surveillance and safety services.

5G-VICTORI Patras Facility

The baseline implementation of the Patras 5G-VICTORI experimental platform is being developed within the ICT-17 5G-VINNI project. The plan in 5G-VICTORI is to upgrade this platform with additional functionalities and to extend it towards several operational facilities owned by Greek vertical industries. This will allow the implementation of the 5G-VICTORI UCs running in Patras, and will be able to also support cross-vertical and cross-facility experimentation and KPIs validation. In this regard, different 5G service classes will be supported, i.e. eMBB, uRLLC and mMTC.

Developed solution

Figure 1 5G-VICTORI deployment at D1 for UC #4 (including equipment needed for UC #1-3)

The proposed deployment scenarios assume that a train approaches a TRAINOSE station and connects to the station through 5G NR in order to download streaming content in a “data shower” fashion, with the aid of a CDN multi-level solution. The content includes COSMOTE TV 4K Video on Demand content and COSMOTE TV linear services. Moreover, the train station is monitored through a 360° camera of high quality video. For this functionality at the end-user side:

A 5G CPE will be on board the train along with an Edge server (on board).
A 360° camera will be deployed at the D1 for uploading content to a remote Operations Center (through the gNB at D1).

A commercial CDN solution for the support of Live TV & multi-play services will be provided, namely fs|cdn™ Anywhere (Full Service Content Delivery Network) in the context of 5G-VICTORI project. The fs|cdn™ Anywhere solution is a full-fledged platform that incorporates components/features required for the acquisition, encryption, distribution, caching and reception of digital content, with support for Set-Top-Boxes (STBs) as well as Smart TV, Smart Phone (iOS and Android) and Tablet devices (iOS and Android). A variety of management tools and back-office interfaces are also included, supported by business and technical consulting and customization services.

The centralized CDN components, such as video head-end and management platforms are typically deployed on the mobile core. On the contrary, caching and streaming server components can also be deployed at MEC level, acting as edge streaming proxies and offering the benefits of not only disaggregation of core network traffic, but also low latency communication to end users and reliable and stable streaming rates. ICOM is building upon the associated technical expertise to support a CDN-oriented use case in 5G-VICTORI, deploying the customized fs|cdn™ Anywhere solution over distributed infrastructure

Service Deployment

On one hand, VoD (Video on Demand) services will be demonstrated over innovative CDN (Content Data Network) platforms that will be integrated into 5G network and railway infrastructures, leveraging VNF and edge computing capabilities as well as the Gb datarates of the 5G air interface. Large volumes of TV content streams or media library assets are cached/pre-fetched on an on-board server upon 5G network availability at train stops, using “data shower” techniques; thus, enabling subsequent view during inevitable, undesired disconnection periods. On the other hand, mobile TV services (through linear streaming) as part of a FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile Communication System) set of services provided to train passengers will be demonstrated over a 5G network deployed both at the railway trackside infrastructure (poles, train station, etc.) and on-board.