Smart Internet Lab’s Nomadic Node provides 5G-and-beyond services anywhere anytime

6 September 2022

The Smart Internet Lab has completed the first prototype of its “network in a box” solution, called Nomadic Node.

The Nomadic Node is a portable device that can rapidly create an entire network, providing Wi-Fi/4G/5G-advanced wireless and cable broadband connectivity between devices. This unique solution will reshape mobile connectivity as a platform for research and innovation.

The Nomadic Node is based on open standard interfaces, which promotes supplier diversification, creates competition, and lowers the cost of network ownership. This solution will ultimately become more accessible to groups of users such as media content creators for communication services. Open interfaces also enable advanced monitoring and shared sensing information (e.g., improved location services and mobility between radio cells), which can, in turn, be exploited to create innovative media services and applications: for example, in gaming, the position of the player or camera use in the service creation is critical to the service delivery. Other use cases include the creation of temporary private networks in the manufacturing sector, keeping IoT sensory data securely within the business unit for the product being manufactured.

The Nomadic Node will support the creative industries and community services as well as the development and demonstration of a series of use cases, such as:

Broadcasting and interactive content exchange between users
Crowd control & security with local edge processing for facial detection and recognition
Applications and services for smart tourism, gaming, and cultural education
Remote learning environments with 2-way interactions
Broadcasting live community content from events
Mobile Edge Computing for 3D volumetric content
Media-aware network slicing solutions
Enhanced video compression performance
Capturing, processing, and distributing media

This solution provides network and services for different user groups over the same platform, and it features an easy-to-use web user interface for its configuration, automation, and general management of its performance.

The Smart Internet Lab team at the University of Bristol has been working with technology partners on hardware & software development to increase the performance and reduce the size of the solution. This fully functional prototype is currently being used to perform early-stage experimentation and demonstrations, which helps to provide feedback for further enhancement of the solution.

Further information

The Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol is a £100M Information and Communications Technology (ICT) research centre which addresses grand societal and industrial challenges. With 200 experts on 5G radio/wireless, optical communications and networks it challenges the complexity of tomorrow's world by fusing research expertise and innovation in a range of research areas such as: IoT, 5G & Beyond, Future Transport Networks, Smart Cities, Autonomous Networks, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Network Convergence, Mobile Edge Computing and Network Softwarization. Its unique offering across optical, wireless, IoT and cloud technologies enable its experts to bring together end-to-end network design and optimisation and impact regional, national and global ICT innovations.