LiveU Successfully Concludes FIDAL’s ‘Field Trials Beyond 5G’ Research Project, Showcasing Breakthrough Multi-Link Multi-Slice Bonding for Remote Production

Tests encompassed network slicing, private 5G networks, edge computing and network exposure

LiveU has announced the successful completion of the European FIDAL/B5VideoNet (B5GVN) project. The project demonstrated pioneering advancements in remote video production workflows using multi-link, multi-slice 5G bonding for single and multi-cam transmission and feeds back to the receiver. As a leading media contribution innovator, LiveU conducted extensive tests and trials using its multi-camera LU800 PRO units and Xtend connectivity solution with state-of-the-art beyond 5G (B5G) capabilities.

As part of this project, LiveU focused on three remote production use cases:

• Cloud Remote Production – leveraging slicing configurations to guarantee bandwidth and latency for cloud-based broadcast workflows.
• Edge-Based Production – integrating mobile edge computing within an operator infrastructure (like a private cloud).
• On-Site Remote Production with Cloud-Based Solutions – testing uplink/downlink slicing configurations for full production workflows using LiveU’s Mobile Receiver, Xtend and LU-Link together with the LiveU Ingest automatic recording and story metadata tagging solution.

The trials took place at the University of Patras (UoP) B5G testbed in Greece. All three scenarios explored the benefits of multi-link, multi-slice bonding for broadcast-grade video transmission – a mechanism to guarantee specific SIMs bandwidth, latency, or error-rate parameters across the 5G infrastructure. This proved to be especially important under network load and congestion conditions.

The trials included various configurations of Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) and Non-Guaranteed Bit Rate (Non-GBR) slice and multi-slice configurations. Upon deployment in commercial networks, this advanced technology would enable broadcasters and content creators to match service levels to their production requirements, resources and budgets. For example, higher-bandwidth GBR slices could be reserved where necessary, while more economical GBR slices or even NGBR, could be relied upon for less critical traffic or supplementing bandwidth where needed (and per budget). This is valuable for multi-camera sports production, demanding premium quality transmission – enabling bandwidth to be increased to the maximum but not necessarily in all cases and at all costs.

Another key ‘B5G-towards 6G’ technology explored was Network Exposure APIs for network resource allocation – a critical step toward dynamic service orchestration and ‘as needed’ service and resource usage. The project laid the foundation for real-time video contribution service ordering, allowing LiveU and similar applications to dynamically request slices based on event timing and location, ensuring guaranteed quality exactly when and where needed. This technology (and related use cases) allows cellular operators to provide services on an ‘as needed’ basis rather than ‘everywhere all the time’.

Private 5G network (NPN) was used in combination with the above, demonstrating a private network for both uplink and downlink remote on-site production. In addition, spectrum carving was also demonstrated to enable the creation of private sub-networks for guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), with the B5G technology relying on a Software Defined Radio (SDR) in the UoP infrastructure equipment. This may open new monetization opportunities for operators in specific remote production (and other) cases, while presenting strong benefits for customers requiring reliability and quality.

“We ran dozens of indoor and outdoor tests over nine days at the UoP B5G testbed, together with their team. The trials included various slice types across multiple minimum and maximum guaranteed bandwidth levels and 5QIs (5G QoS Identifiers), under different end-to-end service latencies. They successfully demonstrated how LiveU’s multi-link multi-slice 5G bonding technology offers benefits for remote production in terms of reliability, flexibility and cost management – for both customers and operators,” said Baruch Artman, LiveU’s AVP, Head of 5G Projects and ESG. “Other key insights included the ability to order services via standardized network exposure APIs, which is promising for media remote production with applications like our own, enabling network resources and services to be ordered for a specific time frame or even on demand. These are important trailblazing use cases for media production, also for future 6G.”

FIDAL is an EU Horizon project, co-funded by the 6G Smart Networks and Services. Together with LiveU and the University of Patras, other key partners involved in the project included Nova (a major Greek telco), FORTH (The Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas), and Ubitech.