The 5G-IANA Automotive Open Experimentation Platform: Features and Assets at the Disposal of Third Parties

5G-IANA aims at providing an open 5G experimentation platform, on top of which third-party experimenters, i.e., SMEs in the Automotive vertical sector will have the opportunity to develop, deploy and test their services. The provided Automotive Open Experimentation Platform (AOEP) is a set of hardware and software resources that provides the computational and communication/transport infrastructure. This is coupled with management and orchestration components, as well as an enhanced network application Toolkit tailored to the Automotive sector, for simplifying the design and onboarding of new network applications. 5G-IANA exposes to experimenters Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for facilitating all the different steps towards the production stage of a new service. The platform supports different virtualization technologies integrating different Management and Orchestration (MANO) frameworks for enabling the deployment of end-to-end network services across different segments (vehicles, road infrastructure, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) nodes and cloud resources). The 5G-IANA network application toolkit is linked with an Automotive Networks/ Application Functions Repository including an extensive portfolio of ready-to-use and openly accessible Automotive-related functions and network application templates, that are available for SMEs to use and develop new applications. Overall, 5G-IANA aspires to encourage third parties to test novel software or hardware or use cases by exploiting the platform capabilities.