Requirements and design of 5G experimental environments for vertical industry innovations

In a global concerted effort, the networking community is defining 5G as the next generation networking infrastructure. New in the approach is the focus on the requirements of the vertical sectors. The salient characteristic of these sectors is that they are rapidly becoming open ecosystems built on top of common infrastructures. This requires a high degree of technological convergence among vertical industries empowering them with technical capacity and triggering the development of new, innovative products, applications and services. On the technology side, 5G is adopting new concepts and developments such as virtualization at all levels of the infrastructure enabling the 5G network infrastructure to become a key asset of the emerging common environment for technical and business innovation in the vertical sectors. In order to answer the questions "How holistic and unified such an environment can be?", and "How an infrastructure can satisfy and reconcile competing requirements of the vertical sectors?", we present the concept and approach of 5GINFTRE, a project that is tasked to build and operate an open, and extensible 5G NFV-based reference ecosystem of experimental facilities, laying down the foundations for a fully software controlled instantiation of virtual networks meeting the requirements of the vertical sectors.