Experimentation-as-a-Service for Validating 5G Use Cases in a Large-Scale 5G Platform

5G commercialization relies on validating the vertical use cases and selecting the ones creating values for both mobile operators and vertical stakeholders. To transfer the validations to commercialization more quickly, it is important to build a 5G platform not only with a similar scale and reliability as a commercial 5G but also capable of offering advanced beyond 5G services. In this paper, we propose an Experiment-as-a-Service (EaaS) framework which systematically offers four types of testing services, integration, functional, performance, and security testing. Then the iCORA (innovative, cloud-native, open, robust and automated) platform is presented to demonstrate how the EaaS framework could be realized in a large-scale 5G experimentation platform, which offers both diversity and flexibility for testing and experiments. A media use case is used to exemplify how the EaaS tailors the iCORA network to support various demands of vertical use cases and meet their KPIs.