SLICES-RI blueprint

SLICES RI is defined as a scientific instrument to support the discovery process related to the future, emerging digital infrastructures. It is a joint investment between the EU and the member states, on the ESFRI[[1]]roadmap since 2021.

SLICES avoids fragmentation and achieves critical mass by bringing together research communities related to networking protocols, radio technologies, data collection, parallel and distributed computing and in particular cloud and edge-based computing architectures and services.

SLICES is a flexible platform designed to support large-scale, experimental research focused on all domains related to digital infrastructures [[2]], [[3]].

As opposed to similar initiatives worldwide, SLICES is sustainable with a roadmap defined until 2040.

The SLICES blueprint is aimed at sharing the same vision and solutions among the partners as well as proposing a plan for the design and deployment of SLICES RI.

In this blueprint we propose to define the infrastructure baseline augmented with a reference implementation, which aims at keeping a focus on the goals of the project, yet identifying technological challenges and breakthrough at the early stage of the process. The blueprint shall be deployed by the SLICES-RI partners and will provide the baseline service that will be exposed to the experimenters when SLICES will move into the operation phase (continuous integration and deployment strategy that will start mid 2024).

This blueprint is meant to continuously evolve in order to onboard lessons learned and recommendations from the community, both academia and industry.

References

[1]	https://www.esfri.eu/forum

[2]	https://www.slices-ri.eu/, accessed December 12, 2023.

[3]	Serge Fdida, Nikos Makris, Thanasis Korakis, Raffaele Bruno, Andrea Passarella, Panayiotis Andreou, Bartosz Belter, Cédric Crettaz, Walid Dabbous, Yuri Demchenko, Raymond Knopp,SLICES, a scientific instrument for the networking community, Computer Communications, Volume 193, 2022, Pages 189-203,

Concept and philosophy

• The blueprint concept and philosophy
  • Objectives to be reached by the scientific instrument
    • Type 1 studies: Vertical service integration and testing
    • Type 2 studies: Software Defined Networking
    • Type 3 studies: Low level development on resources
    • Type 4 studies: Novel hardware
    • Type 5 studies: cross-topics and resources
  • Reproducible research
  • References

5G blueprint

The 5G blueprint provides a set of replicable software, hardware, and methodology to make experimental research with cutting edge 5G environments.

More precisely, with the 5G blueprint, all is provided to deploy a high performance, scalable, multi-sites 5G network with cloud-native de-aggregated 5G cores serving split 7.2 RAN and run experimental research on it.

In details

• 5G blueprint
  • Single cluster
    • Control Components
      • Operating system
      • Hardware
    • User Plane Components
      • Software UPF
      • Hardware UPF
    • Radio Components
  • Core / RAN separation
    • Network
      • Dedicated links
      • Research network backbone
      • Public Internet
    • Resource orchestration
  • RAN split
  • Research methodology
    • Experiment orchestrator
    • Artifacts repository
    • Metadata registry
  • Reference implementation
  • References

Contact and Support

The blueprint is a joint effort of SLICES community, please send all questions and comments to slices-blueprint@inria.fr.

All emails archived at https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/slices-blueprint.

Please read the archives, maybe your problem as already been addressed in one thread.

Contributors

SLICES blueprint is a contribution of the whole SLICES community.

Bellow is a non-exaustive list of contributors

• Panayiotis Andreou
• Bartosz Belter
• Georg Carle
• Kaoutar Chiboub
• Walid Dabbous
• Anass Dahchour
• Yuri Demschenko
• Serge Fdida
• Sebastian Gallenmüller
• Raymond Knopp
• Nikos Makris
• Tathagata Maiti
• Artem Osmolovskiy
• Andrea Passarella
• Damien Saucez
• Theodoros Tsourdinis
• Brecht Vermeulen

Lexicon

• CPRI: Common Public Radio Interface
• CU: Central Unit
• CU-CP: Central Unit Control Plane
• CU-UP: Central Unit User Plane
• DU: Distributed Unit
• NREN: National Research and Education Network
• PTP: Precision Time Protocol
• RAN: Radio Access Network
• RU:: Radio Unit
• UE: User Equipment