Helping new industries gain advantage from 5G: The WIVE project

As part of the WIVE project, Magister developed 5G technologies and designed the predecessor of Magister SimLab – the cloud-based simulation and visualization platform CloudSim.

In the coming years, tens of billions of connected devices are expected to converge into intelligent and programmable systems that will improve the quality of life in various areas. This change will affect transportation and resource consumption, learning and work, and health and wellness treatment. It will provide massive opportunities for these industries, but also new capacity requirements for networks.

In 2017, an industry group led by Nokia Bell Labs established the collaboration project called WIVE (WIreless for VErticals). Its goal was to make it possible for new types of industries to gain competitive advantage from the latest wireless technologies – especially 5G. The project ran for two years, until 2019.

WIVE was co-funded by Business Finland (previously known as Tekes). It involved several industry, research industry, and academic partners. 

These included, among others, Magister Solutions, Nokia, Teleste, Telia, ABB, Cargotec Kalmar, the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle), Digita, Traficom (The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, previously known as FICORA), Finnish universities, and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

System-level simulation modeling and the development of SimLab’s predecessor

During WIVE, Magister participated in the development of various 5G radio technologies. These included, for example, multi-antenna solutions and eMTC and NB-IoT technologies. We focused specifically on system-level simulation modeling and evaluation.

As part of the project, we designed the cloud-based simulation and visualization platform called CloudSim. The goal of CloudSim was to migrate Magister’s simulation process and tools from local computers to the cloud. This facilitated 5G-related development. Eventually, the design and work over CloudSim led to the development of Magister SimLab.

Identifying innovative business opportunities around 5G

The goal of WIVE was to develop concepts and enable technologies, and test new vertical services offered by 5G. More specifically, these included URLLC, mMTC, and media content delivery. 

New communication services have versatile requirements for reliability, latency, data rates, security and availability. The project wanted to demonstrate that future 5G networks can fulfill these requirements with improved flexibility and cost-efficiency.

A key part of WIVE was the focus on users, as well as identifying business opportunities for different verticals. 5G enables innovative service concepts and business cases across industries, as devices and machines are increasingly more connected. This paves the way for new business models and markets to emerge in the connected world. When exploring new business opportunities for 5G, WIVE also considered the content consumption patterns of end users.

Mikko Uusitalo, the industrial coordinator of the project and the head of wireless advanced technology research at Nokia, highlighted the importance of industry collaboration related to 5G innovation: 

“Industry collaboration is essential in fostering innovation around 5G, and for enabling different industries to take full advantage of the faster connections that 5G promises. Nokia Bell Labs has a strong focus on ultra reliable, low latency communications targeting new wireless communication systems for verticals.

The WIVE project provides us with greater insight into the requirements and opportunities for experimentation to test our solutions.”

Find more information about WIVE

Curious about Magister’s simulation services? Read more about Magister SimLab