Level7

The PRIS project – FLAME replicator in Buseto Palizzolo

Project summary

Thanks to the opportunity of the second and the forth FLAME Open Calls, Level7 has deployed the FLAME environment in a rural area in the south of Italy (Buseto Palizzolo, Sicily).

The replicator in Buseto Palizzolo has been designed to achieve the following main goals:

1. explore Next Generation technologies (e.g., 5G or beyond) in a rural environment
2. enable third parties to run their own experiments, taking advantage of the functionalities offered by the FLAME platform with few effort
3. continue to be operational even after the end of the FLAME project

During the project lifetime, three different experiments have been hosted by the Level7 replicator (HOLOFLAME and HOLOFLAME 2.0 from Intellia and OCTOPUS from Consulservice) in order to test novel edge computing paradigms as well as gather experiences and real measures from the testbed. 

Technical drivers

From the technical point of view, the main features that have been considered in the  infrastructure design and implementation can be summarized as follows

• High availability: the possibility to run the FLAME servers in multiple nodes, makes the infrastructure more robust. If one node (i.e., the computational resources available in the hardware such as CPU, storage, etc.) disappears for power failure, fiber cut or other events, the services can continue running in other locations
• Very distributed environment: instead of running the hardware in one single place, the resources are available in many locations. This also gives a better possibility to run the services as much close as possible to the service consumer
• Plenty of available resources:  the computational environment supports up to hundreds of vCPU, hundreds of GB of RAM and many TB of storage so that there is no limitation to the type of experiments that can run on the infrastructure or even multiple experiments running at the same time
• Radio and Fiber interconnection: all nodes are currently connected via radio but most of them are upgrading to fiber links, thus providing speeds up to 10Gbps or more if needed.

BenefitsThe infrastructure permits to run experiments both in outdoor (Figure 1) and indoor (Figure 2) environments in WiFi unlicensed frequencies (both 2Ghz and 5Ghz) thanks to Level7 devices installed in multiple locations.

Thanks to the radio wide coverage, it is possible to host experiments in many verticals such as Augmented Reality, V2V, media content production, drones, tourism, local social networks, etc.

Level7 has invested much in the architecture, the infrastructure and the operational aspects of the FLAME replicator and it will keep working on future development in order to enable third parties to test new ideas or implement innovative services devoted to rural communities.

Contacts

For further information on how to get in touch with the Level7 infrastructure: info@level7.it