TRIANGLE Project

Triangle announces the third Open Call for experimenters to use the Triangle Testbed. This is an excellent opportunity for App makers, IoT and device makers to get early access to this testing and certification platform. In addition to test automation under a wide range of configurable network scenarios, our recently added and upcoming testbed “extensions” provide a range of opportunities for testing AR/VR and streaming applications. The Testbed can support a wide variety of application and device types, here are some examples of the types of experiments that have already been run on the Testbed. The first wave of this call closes on March 11th. For more details see open call or feel free to get in touch with us at opencall@triangle-project.eu.

This year, there will be several TRIANGLE partners at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on 26th Feb to 1st March. Dekra will be in Hall 6 Stand 6L21, Keysight will be in Hall 6 Stand 6G30 and Stand 6O3MR. Quamotion will be in Hall 7 Stand 7G71 where they will be giving a demo of mobile testing. Finally, TRIANGLE partner UCL will be present in the 4YFN startup area. Please feel free to come to any of the partner booths and ask for a demo of the TRIANGLE testbed or some information on the testbed. Or contact Niall Roche from UCL on n.roche@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a meeting with him at the event. We would love to see you there!

Today a number of Virtual Reality apps are entering the marketplace. However, developers still do not have an efficient solution to test them under different radio and network conditions, in particular on a 5G network. The TRIANGLE testbed uses the new solution from DEKRA to test Virtual Reality and other Realities (xR) for Android applications. The solution uses a robotic arm and a testing controller and is designed for automatic testing. It can be used for estimation of xR Apps Quality of Experience, for throughput and battery usage evaluation of xR Apps and for device quality & assurance.

Watch demo: https://youtu.be/B8e13YQ9amE

Find more info: https://performance.tacs4.com/

The Qualcomm TCN (Test Center Network) is a network of device test centers/houses to which Qualcomm provides services and technical support. As part of this technical support Qualcomm provides focused technical training. A Test Center Network Training Session took place in Málaga, Spain the 24 and 25 of January this year for the first time.

As both DEKRA and Keysight are TCN members we took the opportunity to invite Qualcomm representatives to visit the TRIANGLE test bed hosted by the University of Málaga. The visit included the Ada Byron Premises and the microwave and millimetre wave laboratories of the School of Engineering.

A demo of the TRIANGLE test bed was performed. The TRIANGLE portal was used to configure test campaigns in different predefined end-to-end network scenarios and a video app running on a Samsung Galaxy S7 device was tested. Qualcomm representatives inquired about various details of the orchestrator and results processing mode as well as the capabilities of the testbed.

“We are very impressed with what we saw today,” said Vikram Malhotra, Director of Program Management, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. “Network and device testing will be instrumental in ensuring successful commercialization of 5G in 2019.”

The latest version of the testbed is capable of doing handovers using commercial core networks and is called S1 Handover. This new feature brings our network scenarios closer to fully realistic mobility scenarios. Answering basic test questions as to how your app/device performs when moving between different coverage areas – just as you do in your day-to-day life!

If you do not know what you can test we can work it out for you! We have extended the number of test cases supported so the experimenters just have to click on those featured supported by their apps and the testbed automatically will generate the bunch of testing campaigns needed to test your application.

The deadline for submitting your paper at the Triangle-organized workshop on 5G End-to-End Performance Evaluation and Testing (5G-PET) has been extended to November 12th. The new deadline is a hard one, and no further extensions will be granted. Submit your paper today!

TRIANGLE presented the 5G testbed project at the Crowncom 2017 H2020 FIRE+ Workshop on Radio Access Experimentation. The presentation explained the objectives of the 5G testbed and what testers can do on the testbed. It included examples of the types of testing carried out by successful applicants to the project’s Open Calls to date

Our next round of Open Calls will be in Q1 2018.

The second round of Open Calls has recently closed in the TRIANGLE project and it was another highly competitive and top quality arena. Our largest set of applicants, for the Open Calls to date, yielded six new experimenters. These experiments are wide-ranging, covering areas such as SDN/NFV, MEC, video-streaming and MM2M using narrowband technologies.

We are also delighted to report that as a result of the Open Call we have two exciting extensions to add additional features for our Testbed. These extensions will further improve the Testbed’s ability to support experiments that wish to use Mobile Edge Computing, SDN, and to perform QoE evaluation using video streaming. More on these exciting new additions in a future newsletter.

An Experiment Spotlight on D-Cube (Triangle’s First User) shows how useful the TRIANGLE testbed is to experimenters.

D-Cube are the first company to complete testing their Spacewars application using the Testbed. D-Cube have been evaluating the behaviour of their immersive video streaming solution under various different network scenarios and have found the Testbed to greatly help in identifying performance issues under different conditions, such as sub-optimal network conditions. D-Cube found the Triangle Testbed to be invaluable in diagnosing these issues and remarked that “…the knowledge acquired will greatly help in designing adaptation solutions (e.g. adaptive streaming, toggling VBR, offering spectating guidelines, etc.) for sub-optimal network conditions.”

D-Cube are in fact planning on continuing to evaluate the impact of network slicing using the VPS capability of the Testbed.

Spacewars architecture

The next release of the TRIANGLE testbed is about to be open to third parties for testing mobile applications and devices and is bringing exciting new features! We are delighted to announce the second release of the testbed coming onstream in October 2017.

On the usability of the testbed, TRIANGLE has improved its user interface for testers, to ease and improve the execution of complex campaigns over a fully configurable mobile network. TRIANGLE has furthermore obtained KPIs from the measurement points of the testbed and defined a set of ETL (extract, transform and load) transformations to extract data from the device or application under test and convert it to a useful parameter for evaluation. These transformations provide advanced metrics to the tester and ultimately will evolve the testing to a TRIANGLE mark or certification in the third release.

Additionally, more complex domains are now supported thanks to the addition of a robotic arm and GPS emulation. The robotic arm can be programmed to perform user defined movements, and the GPS feature hooks emulated satellite signals into the GPS antenna, enabling the emulation of a user-defined geographical route. With these two new features in the TRIANGLE testbed, we are now ready to hunt down Pókemon anywhere in the world!

On the measurement side of the testbed, instrumentation of the different testbed elements has been improved. The instrumentation now supports the remote capture of packets in any testbed interface. This enables the extraction of advanced measurements such as estimation of the control plane latency. These measurements can be used to characterize the amount of time consumed by a UE when registering on the network, such as coming back from energy save mode, etc. Time synchronization is also a feature of this second testbed release where all the network elements will be synchronized using the IEEE-1588 precision time protocol.

Finally, the network architecture of the testbed is also evolving with the inclusion of heterogeneous technologies such as controllable Wi-Fi access points to provide aggregation of LTE and Wi-Fi data.

We are currently using a very mature prototype to explore mobile edge computing which is on the testbed roadmap, and which we have also targeted in the open calls of the TRIANGLE project.

And stay tuned as there is still more functionality coming in the third release of the testbed, which will support TRIANGLE mark certification campaigns.

15-18 April 2018 // Barcelona, Spain
5G End-to-End Performance Evaluation and Testing (5G-PET).

The Triangle project has experienced firsthand the need for performance testing and verification of 5G networks and services. In order to foster lively discussion and promote the awareness of these (sometimes neglected) aspects of 5G, the Triangle project has organized a dedicated workshop in conjunction with the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC): 5G End-to-End Performance Evaluation and Testing (5G-PET).

5G-PET primarily wishes to bring experts and customers together and stimulate the discussion of a number of topics, from mobile Application and Services evaluation, to End-to-End simulation and emulation, to 5G End-to-End trials and testbeds.

For this reason, the Triangle project now invites YOU to submit a full conference paper to the workshop bringing new ideas on performance evaluation of 5G components, rather than just new testing methodologies. A Call for Papers is available here.

Furthermore, we will have the TRIANGLE testbed set up at this workshop such that workshop attendees will be able to have hands-on experience with the Triangle testbed! Attendees will not only be able to create their own test cases by changing the network performance parameters, but also to bring their own mobile Applications and have these tested. You can come away from this workshop with the results of your Application’s performance in these tests.

Please note that the Paper submission deadline is November 3rd 2017.