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India’s first 5G Testbed Project - The dawn of disruptive changes

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DQINDIA Online
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently inaugurated India’s first 5G Testbed. Set up at the cost of Rs 200 Crore, the Testbed is a platform for industry players and start-ups to test and validate Made-in-India products locally.

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The launch was followed a few days later by a live demo of a voice and video call using 5G Technology. The demo by IT Minister of Communications Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw used the facilities provided in this Testbed. His tweet, “5G Testbed at five locations in India is a big step towards developing indigenous 5G ecosystem. #25yearsofTRAI”, which followed the demo, signaled that India has arrived on the world stage in terms of 5G.

The establishment of the 5G Testbed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is a significant step for India, toward being “Aatmanirbhar” as a country, specifically in critical, cutting-edge technologies in the Telecom sector. Not merely aimed at increasing internet speed, the Testbed also heralds an increase in the pace of development and job creation, positive changes in the governance, ease of living, ease of doing business, boost in agriculture, health, education, infrastructure, and logistics.

The 5G Testbed project is built to resemble a real-world 5G deployment closely. Equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, the Testbed will enable Indian industry and academia to leapfrog and make advances not only in 5G but also in future technologies like 6G, where India plans to make its mark.

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The multi-institute collaborative project has created a prototype and testing platform, developed under the guidance of the faculty from IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Delhi, IISc Bangalore, CEWiT, and SAMEER Chennai. In addition,  a team of more than 200 researchers and engineers from different organizations collaborated to ensure the success of the project.

The Testbed project delivers an end-to-end 5G testbed comprising a 5G Base Station and UE nodes that support enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), Ultra Low Latency Communication (URLLC), and massive MTC, including NB IoT services. The operating frequency includes sub 6 GHz and mmWave frequencies (28GHz). The Base Station consists of Radio Units (RU) and Distributed Units (DU0, that are compliant with the 5G NR 3GPP Specifications (compliant to ORAN 7.2x split). The Testbed has two variants of RUs, namely the n78 band (in FR1) and 28GHz (in FR2) band. In addition, the 5G Core and Antenna Subsystem of the respective RUs are the other vital components of this Testbed. The Baseband Processing in the DU is realized using accelerator cards built using COTS FPGAs, while the Layer 2 and Layer 3 processing is implemented on the x86 server platform.

Direct benefits of the 5G Testbed Project : Self-sufficiency, commercial viability, innovation and skill development

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Until recently,  Indian telecom players had to go abroad to test and validate their products for installation in a 5G network. India’s first 5G testbed does away with this dependency. It supports the telecom industry and startups by providing a domestic platform to validate their products, solutions, and prototypes in 5G. This benefit is extended to several other next-generation technologies as well. It allows techn companies to use the testbed to integrate the new features, functionalities, and capabilities of 5G. This will help to develop new use cases by promoting early prototyping and experimentation of new 5G features; build new products and solutions and drive innovation.

While 5G testbed tests and validates advanced R&D initiatives and incubates ideas, it also highlights the inherent challenges involved in deploying new 5G technologies . As a matter of course, this leads to developing solutions that overcome the challenges and moves the projects closer towards commercial viability.

Skill development, which is an integral part of any self-sufficient nation, is another beneficiary of the 5G testbed. Testbed will provide never-before opportunities in digital learning, experimentation and research & development, for students, educators, institutions, and R&D bodies With new opportunities in research and development, new start-ups and  new businesses,that have international collaborations, India will soon be the hotbed for many new skills. 

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As future 5G solutions and applications evolve, the testbed will also provide users with the early bird advantages.

Testbed – The interdisciplinary, Research & Development Incubator model

Similar testbeds have been created in other parts of the world as well. The most popular one is the COLOSSEUM. Colosseum emulates the wireless environment with 256 programmable software radios. It enables academia, government, and industry researchers to perform scalable and repeatable experiments in wireless systems in a large-scale environment. The Testbed is located at the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University at Boston, US and the system is remotely accessible to users. Resources can be reserved through a web interface. As an RF Testbed, Colosseum can be configured to emulate multiple operational environments, including a one sq. km open field, a dense urban city, a suburban shopping mall, a desert, or anything in-between. It can be used to support cellular network testing, IoT investigations, edge computing research, the implementation of machine learning algorithms, cloud RAN research, and much more.

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In the United Kingdom, the government announced the 5G Testbeds and Trials Program in 2017, creating a national 5G innovation network. The government intended its investment—equivalent to about 1.02 billion US dollars—to stimulate market development and deployment of 5G technology and infrastructure for 5G projects in the United Kingdom. The government announced six primary testbeds:

5G RuralFirst—tested spectrum sharing and other networking technologies in hard-to-reach remote areas

5G Smart Tourism—demonstrated virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to enhance visitor experiences at museums and festivals

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Worcestershire 5G Consortium—used robotics, augmented reality, and data analytics to optimize manufacturing

Liverpool 5G Testbed—deployed 5G technology to older adults living independently to address loneliness and improve communication with hospitals

AutoAir—explored 5G technology in autonomous vehicles as well as air and rail transportation

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5G Rural Integrated Testbed—connected residents in rural communities and tested drones and machine learning to optimize farming

These fully functional cellular technology facilities help bring solutions out of R&D labs and into early real-world deployment. With this, companies can showcase new applications to grow market opportunities. 

Overall, looking at the approach taken by most testbeds worldwide, it appears that these are genuinely the “Computing sandboxes” that allow the technology to grow and flourish by enabling academicians and industry experts to try out futuristic aspects related to wireless communication.

The author is Anindya Saha, Chief Technology Officer, Saankhya Labs

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