Overview of TestBed

IIT Delhi focused on development of the applications/ecosystem which harness the Low latency, multiple concurrency potential of 5G & its security requirements.  Faculty and research scholars at IIT Delhi developed novel & innovative algorithms/ components in areas of i) Energy Harvesting in IoT systems ii) Security iii) Light Fidelity iv) Cost Effective Air pollution monitoring system v) Multi Access Edge Computing vi) Low latency Haptics vi) Selective Algorithms in MIMO. The developed components (both hardware and software) are demo-ed, showcasing smart campus solutions. Detailed features of the subprojects and Tech Specs are explained separately.

In this project, we have demonstrated a full-fledged MEC platform based on the ETSI architecture and integrated with emulated 5G core & RAN following ETSI 5G specification with application deployment use-cases. The various MEC and 5G core components are instantiated in the virtual machine as a guest as well as on individual servers; the complete data path and control path is established between all core components following a service-based architecture. The work was carried out in various phases which involves instantiating of ETSI ISG standard MEC testbed. The MEC system is integrated with 5G core using three UPF design. Furthermore, an optimal host selection algorithm is developed for selecting the cost effective MEC hosts. The MEC implementation is also enhanced to follow NFV considerations with ETSI standards (MEC in NFV Environment). Moreover, various applications involving were deployed to validate the developed MEC system for real-world deployment.

The Smart meter & Energy harvester prototype development in IITD Labs is a driving enabler for connecting millions of IoT devices to the 5G Telecom network. IoT devices will be installed, many a times, in locations where there are power constraints & network bandwidth issues.  The goal of this sub-project was to research & develop low power consumption and bandwidth efficient components for socially relevant applications using Learning based algorithms and optimal hardware design & prototyping. The researchers work in this domain will be show cased via two prototypes– i) Energy Harvester & ii) Smart Meter. This unique research work has garnered much interest in their fields with the research findings published in acclaimed papers, media coverage, and awards and signing of Knowledge Transfer agreements with Industry.

5G is especially vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to the planned deployment of millions of lightweight, energy constrained low cost IoT devices. The faculty along with their scholars explored and developed a number of novel algorithms/solutions for securing the 5G system in areas unexplored earlier, like low latency provenance, unique key management methods & new ways of authentication mechanisms. These works have resulted in publishing of papers and awards at International events.

In the 5G Testbed project we have also developed baseband algorithms for 5G NR in collaboration with IIT Madras and CeWit. These algorithms include, i) channel estimation and channel equalization (in collaboration with IIT Madras) and, ii) Blind Decoding of PDCCH (in collaboration with CeWit). The source code of these algorithms has been sent to the respective collaborating institution for integration into the 5G Testbed. The testbed setup & Knowledge is available with faculty & scholars for designing & developing FR1 MIMO. This design and verification setup can be used by industry and academia for the development of baseband algorithms for 5G NR based applications.

Algorithms for  the ability to predict when UE will be active and when it can be asleep is the key mechanism to allow very low UE power consumption without penalizing quality of service. We have used DRX mechanism that allows UE to enter the Sleep mode while subscribed with eNodeB which leads to more amount of power saving. This allows UE to switch into sleep mode for maximum length of time keeping the quality of service within fixed threshold.  The topology on which implementation is done makes the use of LENA module of NS3 simulator. Two UE’s and two eNodeB’s are used and UE is connected to each eNB and kept stationary. Then we have established communication between two UE nodes so that they start sending and receiving the packets to each other. Between this communication DRX mechanism has been implemented for energy saving. Then for both one-way communication and two way communication we have obtained results that what is the energy consumption and energy saving varying the parameters of the DRX Scheme. Then we worked on Energy Harvesting in two way communication in which we made the Markov Chain with four states depending on when UE is active and when UE is not active. And when UE is in Charging Mode and when it is not. And have results of energy harvested and energy consumed in the UE varying the time spent in each state.

Youtube Link: https://youtube.com/@lifiiitdelhi8645?si=J1MdOMXuxVdJ1l6Z