SLICES-IE: The Irish Node of SLICES-RI, Powered by OpenIreland
SLICES-IE, anchored by the OpenIreland testbed, stands as Ireland’s contribution to the SLICES-RI initiative, providing an open, fully programmable experimental platform. Headquartered in the CONNECT research centre, in the School of Computer Science and Statistics of Trinity College Dublin, OpenIreland offers a highly flexible infrastructure that spans radio, optical and cloud domains, enabling seamless experimentation across heterogeneous transmission technologies and network domains.

Through state-of-the-art virtualized 5G radio, reconfigurable optical networks, Cloud-RAN, and SDN capabilities, SLICES-IE supports versatile research configurations. This testbed, extending from the Dublin Docklands to the DCU campus in North Dublin, combines indoor and outdoor 5G New Radio setups with advanced optical transmission and cloud-based processing, providing an adaptable environment for comprehensive experimentation. Leveraging technologies like OpenStack, SDN protocols, Open Ran and Open Optical, SLICES-IE is especially suited for reproducible studies in application of AI to network control, research on network and transmission digital twins, and energy-efficient network solutions.

OpenIreland’s architecture is particularly distinguished by its multi-cloud, multi-tenant configuration, supported by open-source tools such as OpenAirInterface 4G/5G and srsRAN, which allow for customizable, programmable research setups. Its rich optical infrastructure includes over 1,700 km of fiber, ROADMs, coherent transponders, and a reconfigurable optical switch, controlled via an SDN control plane, enabling researchers to reconfigure network topologies.

Supported by national and EU funding initiatives, this open-access infrastructure is a hub for pioneering research, providing the tools and environment necessary for the networking research community to push the boundaries of future network technologies and develop reproducible, next-generation solutions for global deployment.
More information on Open Ireland can be found here: www.openireland.eu