After six months of preparation, the project partners Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Deutsche Telekom and Nokia have now put a test field into operation that covers around 8,000 hectares of port area. As a technical basis, an antenna was installed at a height of over 150 meters on the Hamburg television tower.

The test field is specifically designed to test 5G applications in an industrial environment. The telecommunications network must be particularly reliable and very secure for this. At the same time, it must support a large number of different applications. In the port of Hamburg, for example, traffic lights in the port area are to be controlled via mobile communications and environmental measurement data collected and processed in real time. Virtual reality applications will also help to better monitor potential critical infrastructures such as locks and construction sites, thereby making them safer.

Virtual networks in use

In the 5G test network, the project partners are now testing whether these applications, which each place very different demands on data transport, function reliably in a single network. Special virtual networks, known as "network slices", are used in the 5G test network for this purpose. These support specific applications in the port. For example, separate virtual networks are created for the control of traffic lights and the transmission of environmental measurement data. With 5G, this new network architecture should make it possible for the first time to adapt networks dynamically and flexibly to the requirements of a wide range of applications. In the Port of Hamburg, such a network with several network slices is being tested for the first time in Germany under live industrial conditions.

The 5G test in the Port of Hamburg is part of the two-year research project '5G MoNArch' (5G Mobile Network Architecture for diverse services, use cases, and applications in 5G and beyond). While the test field in Hamburg will primarily test the integration of 5G in traffic and infrastructure control and monitoring, the second test field of the project in Turin will focus on applications from the multimedia sector. The project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research framework program.