Nomadic Node – Mobile 5G experimentation lab

Evaluation of 5G technology in different environments and for different use cases is one of our strong suits. While detailed planning and extensive testing in the lab is important, sometimes a field trial is necessary to enable the next step towards great things. New use cases and exiting applications need a testbed that is suited to provide an infrastructure that is not limiting the possibilities. The Nomadic Node combines all this in a mobile lab, ready to be taken even to remote places, and provides there a research lab grade infrastructure and measurement environment. It eliminates the need for long setup days, limited compute or RAN resources or complex work on constantly changing equipment.

• A portable network can be installed and configured at the specific use case location in a matter of minutes and remain in use for a specific duration of time (such as for fairs, R&D activities, festivals or concrete application scenarios like construction sites)
• A mobile network can be installed in a mobile vehicle to fulfill the specific mobile communication needs of scenarios like public parades, public health or emergency networks

The nomadic node is specially designed to evaluate the usage of 5G campus networks for:

• Spectrum usage around the nomadic node (licensed and unlicensed)
• Connectivity of devices: connecting IoT and communication devices via 5G to an existing infrastructure, e.g., the shop floor
• Power management: especially the mobile edge network must function with the limited power from the vehicle
• Local offloading of the communication: providing support for private local communication
• Backhaul selection between satellite and available terrestrial operators – enabling efficient communication with the central locations and the Internet for data, for control plane as well as for the management of the 5G network
• Reliable edge communication: applications on the edge server provide reliable operation even on unpredictable backhauls

The Fraunhofer FOKUS Nomadic Node exists already in its 2nd iteration both with metro cells in mind. They offer local edge compute resources as well as virtualization and container infrastructure. Network switching, routing as well as multiple uplink solutions from copper cables over fiber to satellite-based uplinks. As a turn-key-solution the nomadic node is fully integrated in terms of monitoring, end-to-end measurement and instrumentation down to the very depts or our Open5GCore network. This enables researchers, developers and integrators from different fields to work without the need of deep 5G or network knowledge.