SMIL: SimulaMet Interoperability Lab

Research Area: Communication Systems; Networks; The Center for Resilient Networks and Applications

Research objectives

The SimulaMet Interoperability lab (SMIL) supports a wide range of research activities at SimulaMet.

It provides an open-source 5G/6G lab for functional and performance studies of emerging concepts for future cellular networks:

The performance and energy consumption of cellular Internet of Things (IoT).
Assessing and utilizing emerging capabilities of low Earth Orbits (LEO), medium Earth Orbits (MEO) and Geostationary Orbits (GEO) in satellite communications. In particular in applications like positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), satellite broadband and 6G satellite services.
Studies on new 5G/6G and IoT applications enabled by edge computing using features such as low latency, high throughput and quality of service guarantees combined with edge computing capabilities available in 5G/6G cellular networks.
Understand and improve the mechanisms required to establish robust cellular networks for reliable infrastructure for new user groups who rely on dependable networks.

Activities

New applications enabled by edge computing

With edge computing deployed in the distributed 5G/6G networks, new applications can be made possible since response times can be guaranteed, and CPU and GPU resources can be made available close to the application. An example is the real-time application of collision avoidance for cars sharing their sensor data with a local edge data center which can execute collision avoidance algorithms within specified time deadlines to provide drivers or self-driving vehicles with time-critical information to avoid collision. In 6G, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) opens new frontiers for critical application development.

Intent-Based Networking

The complexity of management and control of communication networks at scale has inspired multiple improvements in automation and monitoring of operation support systems through the years. New AI tools and algorithms open a new frontier in network control and management, enabling the operators to express intents in configuration and service-level objectives and letting the network translate these in the machine configurations. By observing the network telemetry data, logs and traces, the same system may adapt the network settings and the virtualized backend parameters to prevent failures and better meet the service-level objectives.

This method is of particular interest in order to ensure rapid reconfiguration in case of failure which requires automated response to demand, changes in geographic load in the network, change in network capacity and loss of connectivity with minimal impact for critical applications. The requirement for reconfiguration can also be used for business purposes, for example optimized use of software licenses, where an operator can install hardware at all relevant locations but deploy software licenses only for operation of a subset of this hardware based on actual demand and user dynamics.

Robust cellular networks

New user groups are encouraged to share a common infrastructure to save cost and leverage state of the art technologies. This trend increases the requirements of robustness of the underlying architecture since our society relies not only on critical consumer services like communication services, banking, shopping and logistics, but also applications traditionally served by dedicated networks such as military, emergency (e.g. TETRA) and railroad signalling networks (e.g. GSM-R) which all consider 5G as their next network infrastructure.

We believe heterogeneous infrastructure has several benefits to ensure interoperability and open standards in 5G but this requirement also adds to the complexity of the network since different vendors may rely on different network structures, and different communication protocols even if they are defined by standard bodies such as 3GPP. When the goal of heterogeneous infrastructure is added to requirements from new users, we can see that 5G represents very demanding requirements for the cellular operators and the network infrastructure vendors.