5G-VICTORI is an EU funded project that comprises 25 partners from eight European countries. It addresses the European objective of providing 5G solutions for verticals. This requires developing 5G infrastructures that address a wide range of applications adopting flexible architectures, offering converged services across heterogeneous technology domains with unified software control. The project will utilize and adapt existing infrastructures towards integration of a large variety of vertical and cross-vertical use cases – such as large scale trials for Railway, Energy, Media and Factories of the Future.

Fraunhofer FOKUS business unit Future Applications and Media (FAME) is co-leading the work package coordinating the trials at the four platform sites. FAME also leads the activities at the Berlin platform site which performs three trials:

• Media CDN services in dense, static and mobile environments
• Rail critical services
• Future Mobility

Working together with Deutsche Bahn (DB), RBB und IRT we will experiment and demonstrate the uninterrupted playback of videos from a video catch-up services operated by German public broadcasters such as during train journeys. The trial will allow mobile viewers to continue watching videos during their journey even in areas with limited mobile data coverage by applying concepts of: “data shower”, “low latency streaming”, “link prediction”, “Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)”, “hybrid unicast / multicast”, etc.

FAMIUM, the streaming media ecosystem by Fraunhofer-Institute FOKUS FAME provides the core components for enabling efficient media delivery and playback over 5G. Well known media delivery standards like DASH and HLS will be adopted for smooth integration and interchangeability with 5G.

FAMIUM DASH - which compromises of DASH Packager, Streamer and Player components - provides a fully standard-compliant DASH end-to-end solution that enables content delivery in the highest quality available for a given network and faster start-up times for media playback can also be expected when streaming over 5G. FAMIUM DASH enables also Low Latency DASH streaming with the support of the Common Media Application Format - CMAF and taking the Low Latency capability of 5G into consideration. FAMIUM DASH also supports MPEG-SAND, specified in ISO/IEC 23009-5, which defines standardized message formats for communication between server, client and network elements involved in the streaming process of MPEG-DASH. SAND-capable components are able to exchange real-time information of network and server components, as well as player behavior and performance data. FAMIUM SAND will be integrated in the core of the 5G Network supporting shared resource allocation and fair bandwidth sharing of multiple DASH clients competing for bandwidth in the same network.

FAMIUM Context Aware Encoding will also provide the optimal encoding profiles and bitrate settings for a single asset (title, scene, segment) under specific network conditions. DASH representations which are suitable for media delivery over 5G (higher bandwidth, lower latency) will be taken into consideration.

Furthermore, the Fraunhofer FOKUS Cloud-based 360° Video Playout will be deployed in the 5G core network MEC components (Mobile Edge Computing). This way, the rendering of processing intensive applications like AR/VR and 360° applications will be migrated to the Edge. The Low Latency advantage of 5G will ensure that the user experience is not affected when rendering the applications on the edge. The “Link Prediction” feature provided in FAMIUM SAND allows to respond early to fluctuations in the available bandwidth and latency and adjust the video rendering and stream accordingly.

5G-VICTORI is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP), the joint initiative of the European information and communications industry. The initial goal of this organization was to specify the requirements for the next generation of communications networks and services. Subsequently. at this stage of 5G development, the 5G-PPP Projects are expected to execute large field trials for testing and verifying the performance of 5G technologies in operational environments.