• The City Council wants to prioritise the practical, direct and positive impact of 5G technology on the city’s residents and their standard of living.

For this purpose, the 5G-IoT testing ground, built as part of the European FLAME(Facility for Large-Scale Adaptive Media Experimentation) and 5GCity projects, has been launched in the Poblenou superblock. It will host projects based on new technologies with the aim of becoming a research, entrepreneurship and 5G industry development facility in our CITY.

The entire Poblenou superblock, as well as its surrounding streets, will provide the testing ground for these European projects whose aim is to develop and assess multimedia services and deployment models for these future 5G networks.

The FLAME platform makes it possible to deploy and assess multimedia services for experimenters, primarily small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as for the rest of the local community. This platform uses 5G methods to orchestrate and monitor multimedia services. Examples include the efficient transmission of audiovisual content, low-latency augmented reality at street level, and efficient transcoding of multimedia content captured on the street.

5GCity, the test bench for finding the best way to deploy aerials in the city, introduces mechanisms on a single structure at computing and radio level. It introduces mobile edge computing (MEC) while allowing the testing of neutral hosting in cities such as Barcelona. This enables the infrastructure owner to conclude contracts with operators of other verticals and thus offer computing and radio access services to users, optimising the use of infrastructure in Barcelona.

These projects include carrying out pilots as a working method to adjust the future 5G networks’ features and capabilities. Some of these have already been defined and are awaiting completion of the infrastructure to begin testing. We would like to highlight the following three pilots:

Ficosa, a pilot project under the FLAME project, proposes the use of the new 5G network for V2X communications (communications between vehicles and other elements such as infrastructure, intelligent signalling and pedestrians). It will make it possible to inform drivers of incidents taking place on public highways and detected by nearby vehicles or other elements of the city’s infrastructure. This will enable drivers to choose alternative routes, thus minimising the impact of such incidents on mobility in the CITY.

Betevé, a 5GCity pilot, proposes the ‘Mobile Backpack Unit for Real-time Transmission’ pilot. This will involve broadcasting an interview from the street using the 5G network and sending it to the Betevé headquarters. Interviews will be recorded using 3 mobile units. The information from these mobile units will be partly processed on the servers installed at street level (edge ​​computing), which are controlled remotely by this TV channel’s operators. The purpose is to transfer some of the video pre-production tasks, which are currently carried out on betevé’s computers, to street computers (edge ​​computing) so as to reduce bandwidth and improve the multimedia services’ response time.

With regard to 5GCity, a neutral operator pilot test will be carried out. This involves testing the necessary technology to act as a neutral 5G network operator by serving a number of operators. It will greatly optimise the deployment of technology on the public highway