Newsflash April 2021

5G IA Governing Board and the ‘Smart Networks and Services’ European Partnership

At the recent General Assembly meeting, the 5G IA elected its new Governing Board for a term of two years. The sixteen organisations represented in the Governing Board of the 5G IA are:

• Elected among 5G IA’s “Full Industry Members”: Ericsson, Huawei, Netaş, Nokia, Orange, RHEA Group, Samsung, Telenor, Thales, TIM.
• Elected among 5G IA’s “Full Association Members”: Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI), Public Safety Communications Europe (PSCE).
• Elected among 5G IA’s “Full Research Members”: CTTC (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya), TNO.
• Elected among 5G IA’s “Full SME Members”: Eurescom, Nextworks.

On the same day, the newly elected Governing Board confirmed during its first meeting: Dr. Colin Willcock – Head of Research Alliances- as Chairman of the Governing Board, and Dr. Hugo Tullberg – Principal Researcher at Ericsson – as Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board.

More information on the 5G IA Governing Board is available here.

The 5G IA is the voice of the European industry for the development, deployment and evolution of 5G. At the same time, the 5G IA is preparing for the next chapter in the mobile communications story with the new ‘Smart Networks and Services’ (SNS) Partnership in the framework of the Horizon Europe programme (more information here).

Within the SNS, the 5G IA will be the private side representative, jointly managing the Partnership with the EU. The SNS Partnership aims to support European technological sovereignty on Smart Networks and Services. It will contribute to enable the digital and green transitions and will allow European players to develop the technology capacities for 6G systems as the basis for future digital services towards 2030.

The 5G IA continues to expand its membership (also open to ICT Associations) to make it fit and ready for the SNS Partnership and its extended scope. The association welcomes additional stakeholders to join in order to contribute to the shaping and implementing of the SNS Partnership. In the near future, the association will change its name in order to align it with the SNS Partnership.

Membership applications can be submitted anytime (https://5g-ia.eu/about/5g-ia-membership-application/ and https://5g-ia.eu/about/5g-ia-associate-membership/).

Further information on 5G IA website. 

COREnect on the road to EuCNC & 6G Summit – Opening of a permanent call for new experts

COREnect will be present at the EuCNC & 6G Summit, which takes place on June 8-11, with both a panel and a dedicated workshop.

The panel focused on “Components and hardware on the road to 6G” will be moderated by COREnect coordinator prof. Gerhard Fettweis. 4 high-level executives from the industry will discuss which requirements 6G will impose on components and hardware design, the major challenges & opportunities for Europe on the road to 6G; and how Europe may embrace those opportunities and address those challenges. The potential roles of the various stakeholders in the future 6G ecosystems will also be considered.

The dedicated workshop is entitled “Hardware enabling technologies for 6G networks”. The exact date and time will be announced in due course. The purpose of the workshop is to present the key findings of the COREnect Expert Groups. During the workshop, there will be a panel entitled “Opportunities and Challenges for hardware enabling technologies in the SNS Partnership”.

Combining insights and expertise from the communication and microelectronics domain, the three COREnect Expert Groups address three key areas, and will and share their viewpoints on:

• Electronics for trustworthy communication (6G and beyond)
• Future core technologies and integration
• Energy-efficient and green communication electronics

To narrow the SME and gender gap in its EGs, COREnect is opening a permanent invitation to female experts and experts from SMEs to join the EGs. The COREnect consortium intends with this to enrich the project with different background, perspectives, and viewpoints:

EG1 needs experts in the fields of nanometres technology and storage.

EG2 would like to have a better balance, not only in gender terms but also between large enterprises and small and medium enterprises.

EG3 is always open to meet new experts to get new insights and drive the discussion forward in Sensor Processing, Power Management, Accelerators, User Interfaces, Core Process Technologies as well as System & Component Architectures.

Please find more information on COREnect website.

5G-LOGINNOV Open Call “Paving the way to 5G-enabled tailored services for real-life port-city areas optimisation” open!

5G-LOGINNOV Open Call “Paving the way to 5G-enabled tailored services for real-life port-city areas optimisation” is open! At this link https://5g-loginnov.eu/open-call/  you can find the Tender Conditions, the Application form and the Key Dates. The submission of proposals is open as of 26 April 2021.

5G-LOGINNOV Open Call aims at selecting five innovative start-ups and SMEs to develop 5G-based solutions in the framework of activities carried out at the three Living Labs of the project Athens (Greece), Hamburg (Germany) and Luka Koper (Slovenia). More information about the project here https://5g-loginnov.eu/

5Growth Pilot and Innovation videos available

• COMAU industry 4.0 pilot. The digital twin use case allows the plant manager to receive live information about the production line through a digital representation of the factory: https://youtu.be/rY6ZH75agOk
• INNOVALIA industry 4.0 pilot. The Connected Worker Remote Operation of Quality Equipment use case explores how 5G technologies can be used to enable remote access to the M3BOX, an edge device used to control the Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM), to perform setup and configuration operations: https://youtu.be/EBLm0l32iTQ
• EFACEC Energia’s energy pilot. The Advanced Monitoring and Maintenance Support for Secondary Substations MV/LV Distribution Substation use case helps maintenance teams in repairing substations by providing access to diverse operational information remotely: https://youtu.be/JcLEF3T5nLg
• EFACEC Engenharia e Sistemas transportation pilot. This pilot replaces the wired communication commonly used in railway level crossings by 5G-based wireless devices for two use cases: the Safety Critical Communications use case focuses on railway signaling operations and the Non-Safety Critical Communications use case provides additional information to reinforce the security and to avoid accidents at Level Crossing area, both to the train driver and to the level-crossing maintenance team: https://youtu.be/XP7E_txgmzY

5Growth innovations on AIML-based closed-loop control, multi-domain interaction, and RAN in network slices are also being studied within the 5Growth pilots. Videos of some of the innovations are:

• ‘ML-driven Scaling of Digital Twin Service in 5Growth’ presents automated scaling through the integration of the 5Growth management and orchestration stack with an AIML platform, a monitoring platform and a data engineering pipeline: https://youtu.be/K5GyrAD7h_Q (long version) and https://youtu.be/7V3AKSrWzzY  (short version).
• ‘Performance Isolation for 5G Network Slicing’  presents bandwidth and delay isolation guarantees as part of network slice provisioning on top of SDN transport networks: https://youtu.be/DSGHUBFuvYs

The above videos reflect some of the results of the project after 18 months of work. Stay tuned for more videos of 5Growth pilots and innovations and for the results of the project in February 2022, including open-source code (https://github.com/5growth).

5GZORRO partners 3rd Plenary Meeting and 2-day software Hackathon

The 5GZORRO virtual 3rd Plenary Meeting took place on March 16, 2021, followed by two days of an intense and fruitful Internal Hackathon: From prototypes to a 1st 5GZORRO-core end-to-end demo.

During these three days, more than 40 consortium ùeùbers have joined in a retrospective of the actual status of the project, results achieved and strategies for future improvement in all axes of the project, technical tasks as well as outreach and impact maximisation activities.

The internal hackathon was the first carried out by the project’s partners.

Partners were divided into five teams, each one exploring a set of the various modules under development at this stage of the project, aligned with elemental topics for the project’s success from an integration perspective. Each team has jointly worked towards the integration of the components introduced in the corresponding topic required to achieve the full potential envisioned for the 5GZORRO platform. Some of the hackathon activities were focused on joint development for current sprints, running the first internal integrations of MVP components and running tests to verify the behaviour of integrated modules working together. Furthermore, partners have also set out the roadmap for each module test, release and deployment, and jointly drawn the path towards the 1st 5GZORRO-core end-to-end demo.

More information about the Plenary Meeting on the 5GZORRO website.

5G!Drones at Unmanned Cargo Aircraft conference 2020

Mr. Gokul Srinivasan from robots.expert is partering with 5G!Drones. He participated in the Unmanned Cargo Aircraft conference and presented “Drone Deliveries: Who pays the bills”. In this session, he also shared some useful insights from the 5G!Drones project.

You may watch the session online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhU1D0r6Coc&feature=youtu.be

5G EVE Demo at Annual Orange Research Event

At the 2021 Orange research exhibition called “Salon de la Recherche”, 5G EVE was represented by the “5G Deployment Automation Service” demonstration. The 5G EVE demo presented by Rodolphe Legouable from Orange, was one of the 30 innovative results – selected from more than 100 proposals – to be shown at the event.

The 5G EVE project was indeed selected to demonstrate its end-to-end 360-degree video use case. The demonstration used the whole 5G EVE facility framework, from the portal to the automated deployment and the collection and analysis of KPIs. The 5G EVE demo showed how verticals can operate their use cases on a virtualised 5G platform by deploying their innovative service solution and collecting selected KPIs for performance evaluation.

This year the Orange R&D event, which attracted around 4500 visitors, was held online on four days, from March 23 to March 25and on April 9, 2021. It provided an opportunity to promote some internal Orange projects and to highlight major collaborative initiatives.

Further information is available on 5G EVE website.

Smart5Grid 5G PPP webinar’s: “5G innovations for verticals” presentation

This webinar presented 9 new 5G Innovations for Verticals with Third Parties projects that joined the 5G-PPP in the second half of 2020 to accelerate the take up of 5G in the vertical sectors. The webinar was held in two parts, where four projects presented in the first part and 5 in the second part, with a short introduction from the European Commission and the 5G IA to start. Over 120 participants attended the webinar.

Access this webinar’s videos and presentation here.