In the first session the latest prototyping works as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) of 5G phase 1 were addressed by five vendors: Ericsson (Björn Halvarsson, Sweden), NEC (Naoto Ishii, Japan), Huawei (David Wessel, Canada), Fujitsu (Hiroyuki Seki, Japan), and Rohde & Schwarz (Taro Eichler, Germany). They showed field evaluation results using millimeter-wave and massive MIMO technologies meeting with the requirements of 5G KPIs. The design and evaluation tools for integrated massive MIMO antennas were also exhibited. 

In the second session the main focus was shifted to 5G phase 2 to discuss integration of millimeter-wave and mobile edge cloud to enable 5G-specific applications that need both ultra high data rate and low latency. The five talks were given by Panasonic (Koji Takinami, Japan), Tokyo Tech (Gia Khanh Tran, Japan), KDDI Research (Katsuo Yunoki, Japan), and Intel (Valerio Frascolla, Germany) to stimulate new challenges toward 5G-oriented ecosystem.

As the last part a big panel discussion was held by inviting all speakers from sessions 1 and 2 as panelists. They discussed with the audience practical deployment strategies of 5G RAN using millimeter-wave and massive MIMO technologies with tolerable CAPEX/OPEX. They also pointed out the need for location and application-specific deployment of 5G RAN that must be integrated with mobile edge cloud.

The second session was chaired by Bruno Chatras from Orange and Vice-Chairman of the ETSI NFV ISG. Dr. Andres Gonzalez from Telenor was the first speaker presenting the approaches taken by Telenor for reaching reliability of the Management and Orchestration elements. Andres explained that the Orchestrator is a crucial component in their network infrastructure and that it will be very important to find mechanisms for increasing its reliability over the whole life cycle. Eiji Kawai from the NICT Japanese laboratory introduced their SDN testbed for Future Network Applications. Eiji explained that their main goal is to accelerate research and development of information and communication technologies. Currently their main focus is on IoT applications. Eiji was followed by Dr. Diego Lopez from Telefonica Spain and Chairman of the ETSI NFV ISG, presenting their activities in Software Network Open Source projects. Diego underlined the importance of Open Source Software and especially collaboration between different entities. One aspect which is also important to consider is diversification: Having multiple available solutions for the same problem will reduce risks of single bottlenecks. 

Dr. Ashutosh Dutta from AT&T introduced security challenges and opportunities in NFV environments. After a short introduction about the NFV benefits and use cases, Ashutosh focused on the impacts that virtualization technologies will have towards security. A multi-layer type of infrastructure will have many vulnerabilities that will need to be analyzed and mitigated. Angkoso Suryocahyono introduced TELKOM Indonesia's plans about the transaction towards NFV infrastructures, explaining what the challenges are from their perspective. Finally, Eileen Healy, CEO at Healy & Co, introduced goals and mission of the IEEE SDN Initiative she is currently co-chairing. She introduced the recently launched activities around a global catalogue of Open Source Toolkits and Testbeds and a live portal for federated testbed infrastructures.

The second part of the workshop themed “ICT Enablers for Industrie 4.0/Factories of the Future” started with presentations about the “interaction model” of Industrie 4.0 components (Prof. Christian Diedrich, Plattform Industrie 4.0), followed by an overview of Bosch's collaborations with the IIC and the Plattform Industrie 4.0 highlighting the re-usable best practices derived from Bosch's I4.0 testbeds (Dirk Slama, Director Business Development, Bosch Software Innovations). Subsequently an overview of the Telco perspective on Industrie 4.0 introduced the benefits of Huawei's eLTE-/NB-IoT for industrial applications (Jörg Diedrichs, CTO/CP Carrier Solutions, Huawei). Finally, the perspectives on Industrie 4.0 of a German SME were shared (Marco Bauer, Managing Director, BAM Maschinenbau GmbH).

The workshop ended with a lively attended panel discussion where the different approaches from IIC, AIOTI and the German Plattform Industrie 4.0 were compared, the applicability of the OPC UA and oneM2M standards for industrial applications were discussed and the current readiness of 4.5G technologies (NB-IoT vs. ultra-reliable, ultra-low latency communication) and the vision for the 5G evolution satisfying industrial applications' needs was evaluated.

We look back on a very successful tutorial and workshop on communication aspects within the Industrial Internet of Things, gained many valuable insights out of the event, might see a formal collaboration between the IIC and AIOTI because of this gathering and we are looking forward to our next year's event.

The subsequent interactive session panel revealed that data will play a major role in the 5G ecosystem and that there are different approaches/slice types in 5G to optimize the transport and processing of data. It became clear that the different application demands can only be handled by dedicated slices, however, big data collection and processing beyond or across slices will become challenging. South Africa and other emerging countries may need a fourth dimension, namely low-cost broadband! Also important was to stress the importance of fixed and fiber networks for 5G.

The second session chaired by Prof. Giuseppe Caire (TU Berlin, Germany) looked at “5G Verticals and Enabling Access Network Technologies” and featured talks from the European Space Agency (Herman L. Möller, France), University of Texas (Prof. Robert Heath, USA), and Robert Bosch GmbH (Andreas Müller, Germany). This session emphasized the fact that 5G is a multi-access network environment including satellite networks, automotive networks, and industrial networks. They identified requirements needed for different applications and showed some enablers such as millimeter-wave technology for autonomous driving and factory automation.

A subsequent keynote speech on “Business meets 5G” was delivered by Antje Williams from Deutsche Telekom. Her key message was that 5G is not only radio and that in regard to 5G softwarization end-to-end slicing for dedicated application domains will become a major challenge. Automotive, eHealth, logistics, and consumer multimedia applications were briefly reflected.

Prof. Aki Nakao (Tokyo University, Japan) chaired session three which was devoted to “The Fully Software-based 5G Core Network making Use of SDN/NFV/MEC Paradigms” and featured four talks from Orange (Bruno Chatras, France), ETSI (David Boswarthick, France), Telefonica Spain (Diego Lopez), and Verizon (Billy Felton, USA).

In the session panel, which Hans Einsiedler from Deutsche Telekom joined, the major discussions centered around the needed cultural change to consider 5G as a software platform and to make intense use of open source. Softwarization is rapidly progressing in existing networks and the commercial rollout of software-based networks already started. It became clear that open source becomes the future and that standards are strongly needed but also diversity in open source software to maintain competition and drive innovation.

The last session “First-hand Experiences from International 5G Case Studies and Testbeds” was chaired by Prof. Tarik Taleb (Aalto University, Finland) and comprised four talks; namely from KDDI Research (Fumio Watanabe, Japan), Deutsche Telekom (Peter Feil, Germany), TNO (Jose L. Almodovar, The Netherlands), and Berlin 5G Testfield (Frank Schramm, Germany).

In the final panel the different approaches of building open testbeds were discussed and again the role of open source software toolkits was underlined and that strong life cycle management and maintenance/stability of open source software is the key for the future. In many of the talks the FOKUS OpenXXX toolkits were utilized as being considered a solid basis for prototyping.