In a webinar on 27 February 2020, the 5G EVE Portal was for the first time demonstrated live to the interested public. 47 participants, mostly from vertical use-case (ICT-19) projects of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G PPP), attended the live demo of the 5G EVE portal and validation framework.

The webinar was moderated by Mauro Boldi from TIM, the coordinator of 5G EVE. Originally, the 5G EVE Portal was planned to be presented at MWC 2020 in Barcelona. Due to the cancellation of the event, the 5G EVE team had decided to present the demo online instead.

After the welcome and overview by Mauro Boldi, Manuel Lorenzo from Ericsson Spain, technical manager of 5G EVE, briefly explained the roadmap of the 5G EVE validation platform for 2020 and 2021. The roadmap involves three major activity areas: (i) platform validation, (ii) cooperation with ICT-19 projects, and (iii) continued platform development.

The demo was presented by Giada Landi from Nextworks, who is deputy technical manager of 5G EVE. Before going into the actual live demo, she gave an introduction to the 5G EVE experimentation workflow, which consists of four phases: (i) test design, (ii) test preparation, (iii) test execution and monitoring, and (iv) test performance evaluation and analysis. She went on to explain the key roles in the experimentation workflow:

• Vertical: actor with the knowledge of the service to be tested, including SLAs and service components.
• Verticals’ VNF (Virtualized Network Function) provider: actor who provides the VNF packages for the vertical applications.
• Experiment developer: actor responsible for specifying the blueprints associated to an experiment, as well as the associated NFV network services descriptors. This user has the knowledge about the 5G EVE infrastructure and expertise about NFV network service modelling.
• Experimenter: actor responsible for the request of an experiment and the assessment of its results; defines the characteristics of an experiment starting from its blueprint, requests the deployment of related virtual environment and experiment execution and analyses results and KPIs.
• Site manager: system and infrastructure administrator for a 5G EVE site.

In addition, Giada Landi explained the basic concepts and terminology, including Experiment Blueprint, Network Service Descriptor, and Experiment Descriptor. After the introduction to the 5G EVE experimentation workflow, she logged into the portal and went live through the steps of setting up an experiment on the 5G EVE Portal.

Graphical user interface of the 5G EVE portal