5G Early Access Program – Improving our APIs!

The overarching goal of our 5G Early Access Program and the 5G Testbed on our Berlin campus is the continuous improvement of our API products. This is an iterative process in which several areas are intensively involved. Performance of the APIs provided, the simplicity of their use, and the quality of the associated documentation are key topics.  

To achieve these goals, we invite several batches of startups to test our 5G APIs with their use cases over the years. Systematically interviewing the developers on site in Berlin prove to be of great value to us. Our research team plays a central role in this task.

Among our goals for the third batch of developers in the 5G Early Access Program were to continue to evaluate the provided 5G APIs – 5G Latency API and 5G Throughput API – and their documentation, which we want to be useful and attractive. We also identified specific problems, errors, bugs and other impediments which may cause problems for developers.

Katarzyna Wala of hubraum’s research team summarizes the results: “We were happy to note that all the exposed APIs have an impact on the performance of the tested solutions. Of course, there remains room for improvements which we will work on moving forward. Overall, the APIs deliver what’s promised, while being simple, but powerful at the same time.”

2023 will see an expansion of both our scope and the number of testbeds. We will kick-off the year with joint developer relations involving T-Mobile US in January. Watch out for our showcase at WMC 2023 to learn more! We’re already in the middle of the 4th batch, which will be on-site in both Berlin and Seattle in mid-January. Last, but not least, we are going to test new APIs and bring them to the developer community, such as Device Status or Slicing APIs.

But for now, let’s dive into the exciting use cases this 3rd) cohort brought to our campus. Four developer teams came to hubraum to test the 5G Latency API and 5G Throughput API, which are being developed as part of the Quality on Demand API family in the CAMARA project.

ITC builds software that solves traffic jams. Based on existing hardware (cameras and traffic light infrastructure), ITC has developed computer vision and machine learning algorithms that predict traffic patterns and prevent traffic congestions before they accumulate. The software simultaneously enforces municipal traffic policies, such as public transport, bicycle, and pedestrian prioritization.

ITC uses the Prioritization API to simulate situations when there is heightened demand for the 5G infrastructure, and the system cannot not attend to user demands. The system then sends a signal through the API and asks for prioritization, thus ensuring that it continues to fully function.

Dvir Kenig, co-founder & CTO of ITC, explains: “We wanted to show the synergy between our software and the Telekom API and to learn more about 5G cellular demand peaks. We met with domain experts from DT to better understand the 5G structure, its topics, and the future API”.

VIEWAR provides a complete infrastructure to create, manage, test and publish augmented reality (AR) applications. This ecosystem allows non AR experts to create AR experiences for use cases like indoor navigation, remote assistance, predictive maintenance or product visualization.

VIEWAR plans to move the computation from the user’s device to its cloud infrastructure, so that bandwidth and latency will enable a smooth, lag-free experience.

“I was curious about the capabilities of the new 5G APIs and how they can help developers to create new use cases,” says Adnan Ćosić, AR Solution Advisor at Viewar. “In this regard our expectations were fully met, and we are looking forward to seeing more APIs released.”

flyXdrive develops, builds and operates unmanned aerial systems for use in various scenarios. Among these is supporting firefighters in gaining situational awareness when dealing with emergencies covering large areas. In such a situation, a high quality, low latency video stream is provided to the team. For flights beyond visual line of sight, the data can be transmitted over a public 5G network. High video quality and availability of the service are paramount for this use case.

To demonstrate their solution, flyXdrive set up a test rig with a video camera connected to a single board computer with 5G connectivity. When the network became congested, the stream quality dropped, or the stream was completely lost. After activation of the Throughput API, the video link could be established and did not lose quality even in a highly congested network.

“We expected to gather hands-on experience with a 5G Stand-Alone network, which included using our hardware to connect and test the latency and bandwidth,” says Yavor Dobrev, Development Engineer of flyXdrive. “Furthermore, we expected to test the functionality of the proposed API. Both expectations were fully met.”

T-Labs is the R&D department of Deutsche Telekom, focusing on translating new technology trends and delivering tangible results into Deutsche Telekom’s innovation portfolio.

For the security use case “Digital Quantum Key Distribution over 5G Networks”, T-Labs used the 5G QoS API to acquire a guaranteed low-latency flow between its quantum key management server and its devices. Additionally, it measures the efficiency of the secure application.

“It met my expectation, since I know now how my use case can benefit from the network QoS API”, Ming Yin, R&D Expert at T-Labs, told us."