BLB’s role in the testing of the Network Application for Automotive and PPDR verticals

BundlesLab Kft (BLB) is a Hungarian SME, which provides a number of services to operators, manufacturers, and telecommunication companies in the fields of wireless mobile systems. BLB is also developing their own line of software products for different systems and devices that allow enhancing the QoE for mobile subscribers.

In January 2021, BLB joined the 5GASP project (Horizon 2020) and brings its expertise and knowledge together with DriveU in bonding technologies to 5G-based Automotive and PPDR use cases targeting a large market.

BLB has already participated in several research projects and among them, qualitatively stood out 5G-Xcast project (Horizon 2020). With the participation of BLB and LiveU, the 5G-Xcast H2020 project has paved the way toward the use of bonding technology in the core of 5G networks. BLB in close collaboration with LiveU has designed, implemented, and evaluated a new multilink network function in 5G core for media delivery using multi-channel technologies. In 5G-TOURS, BLB again in close collaboration with LiveU leveraged the multilink solutions from 5G-Xcast Horizon 2020 project for the Touristic city use cases. Among them, the most challenging, but impressive was the realized performance of the itinerant orchestra, which took place in Turin.

Also, BLB was one of the main contributors to the development of QoE estimation methodology for different 5G-TOURS use cases. It was shown that QoE is not directly dependent on radio technology, but the expectation will increase with higher performance. Increasing expectation changes QoE but it happens for all technologies then. Thus, after doing a lot of tests and correlation-regression analysis it is possible to estimate overall QoE by analysing only the most valuable network KPIs. This developed methodology was successfully implemented in practice during the project’s third year and allowed us to achieve very nice and interesting results. By the way, this approach was reflected in the paper.

Now BLB team is a comprehensive part of the 5GASP project. BLB is taking the leading role in WP7 related to the dissemination activities of the project, promoting the visibility of 5GASP for the external stakeholders. BLB has participated in many scientific and industrial events and contributed to research papers. BLB team has already developed the 5GASP Community portal and Network Application Store portal as well and now maintains them.

Regarding the technical part of BLB’s contribution, we would like to highlight the strongest collaboration with DriveU and other project partners, developing and testing the two Network Applications: “Vehicle-to-Cloud (V2C) Real-Time Communication Network Application” and “Remote Human Driving Network Application – Teleoperation for assisting vehicles in complex situations – RHD”.

Figure 1. The architecture of the V2C Network Application

The core technology on the network layer used for both Network Applications is multilink. Multilink connection of single user terminal to multiple radio access points is a 5G key enabler in order to satisfy the demanding requirements on 5G mobile networks. The multilink solution supports simultaneous connectivity and aggregation across different technologies such as 5G, LTE, and unlicensed technologies such as IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi). In 5GASP multilink technologies will be used to increase total available bandwidth and reduce latency for very challenging and interesting use cases, including remote human driving use cases (https://driveu.auto/).

The role of BLB in 5GASP is the support, updating, adoption and testing of the developed by DriveU Network Applications, which uses a multilink approach. For that, the BLB team has already contributed to the development of the methodology of the project, test cases, test scenarios, NESTs, etc. and in the nearest future are aiming to deploy mentioned above Network Applications on the project facilities for their testing. Hopefully, the first results will be received by the end of the summer period.

In the conclusion, we would like to say that the BLB team is very proud to be a part of the 5GASP project and is fully dedicated and committed to contribute to its success!