Newsflash June 2021

European Commission, European ICT Community and 5G IA Press Releasepresent the SNS JU partnership for 6G in Europe

European Commission and European ICT community present a new 900million Euro joint undertaking to develop 6G in Europe.

Brussels – June 22^nd, 2021 – The workshop[1], which took place online on 11^th June at the joint EuCNC & 6G Summit, presented the objectives and structure of the new European Joint Undertaking (JU) on Smart Networks and Services (SNS). The goal of the SNS Partnership will be to define and implement the research, innovation and deployment roadmaps that will enable Europe to take a leading role in the creation of the next generation of smart network technologies and services which will be known as 6G.

The SNS JU partnership will focus on facilitating the full digitization of European society including vertical industries and public administration services. The 6G SNS solutions will be designed and implemented in such a way that European values like security and privacy are safeguarded, and that European technological sovereignty is further strengthened. The SNS Partnership targets to have a perceptible positive impact on the quality of life for European citizens and a noticeable boost in the European data economy by 2030.

The SNS JU partnership has the following objectives, namely:

• Fostering Europe’s technological sovereignty in 6G by implementing the related research and innovation (R&I) programme leading to the conception and standardisation around 2025, providing solutions fitting with societal European needs and values, as well as preparation for early market adoption of 6G technologies by the end of the decade.
• Mobilising a broad set of stakeholders to address strategic areas of the networks and services value chain from edge- and cloud-based service to provide new market opportunities in new components and devices beyond smartphones.
• Boosting 5G deployment in Europe in view of developing digital lead markets and of enabling the digital and green transition of the economy and society. For this objective, the JU will coordinate strategic guidance for the relevant programmes under the Connecting Europe Facility, in particular 5G Corridors. It will also contribute to the coordination with national programmes (e.g., under the Recovery and Resilience Facility) as well as other European programmes and facilities such as Digital Europe Programme (DEP) and InvestEU.

More information about the SNS Partnership can be found at https://5g-ia.eu/sns-horizon-europe/.

Peter Stuckmann, the Head of Unit – Future Connectivity Systems, DG CONNECT in the European Commission and Dr. Colin Willcock (Chairman of the 5G IA), as the representative of the private side in the SNS JU partnership, presented the European vision for the 6G initiative and discussed the current status of the SNS Partnership and the next steps.

The first calls for project proposals under this new SNS JU are expected to be launched later this year, with the first projects starting later in 2022.

During the session it was indicated that the 5G IA has a continuous open call for new members to join. The process is fully open for all stakeholders from the large industry, SMEs, Research and Academia but also other Associations. The only requirement is that organizations have a clear research activity and a seat in one of the EU Member States, or Associated, or candidate countries. The 5G IA is especially interested to invite verticals to join its ranks as the new SNS Programme is placing a strong focus in this area. More information on how to join the 5G IA can be found at https://5g-ia.eu/about/5g-ia-membership-application/

[1] https://www.eucnc.eu/smart-networks-and-services/

The full press release is available here.

The 5G PPP phase 3 brochure is out!

The third Phase of the 5G Public-Private Partnership co-financed by the European Commission under the Horizon2020 research and innovation programme fully reflects the European 5G policy based on a massive adoption of 5G network infrastructures by vertical industries. The full promise of 5G based on the implementation of the Standalone option to serve advanced use cases from vertical industries is still to fully materialise.

The 5G PPP Phase 3 provides massive support to this objective, with comprehensive trial and pilot opportunities offered not only to the ICT industry but also to vertical user industries to test their innovative use cases with large scale 5G infrastructures. With 53 running projects representing a
430 million EUR public investments, more than 570 beneficiaries including about 80% of industrial actors and more than 40% of SMEs, this third Phase represents one of the largest incentive programme towards 5G adoption by industrial users in the world. Many domains have been successfully addressed through trials and pilots, notably automotive, healthcare and remote monitoring and operations, collaborative media production, logistic application in harbours, public safety life-critical intervention, connected ambulances, large scale events with PMSE applications, and many more.

Beyond pilots, the third Phase of the 5G PPP has also allowed to progress on specific technological issues contemplated by 3G PP for future releases. Typical cases includes very high precision positioning, industrial IoT, broadcast option, NTN scenarios including satellites or drones, blockchain-based security to name a few.

Finally, this third Phase prepares our European stakeholders to the future, with the implementation of 9 projects dedicated to early studies on what Beyond 5G or 6G could be.

Read more here.

5G IA publishes its White Paper ‘European Vision for the 6G Network Ecosystem’

This White Paper is a major milestone at a time when the 5G IA is preparing for the next chapter in the mobile communications story with the new ‘Smart Networks and Services’ (SNS) European Partnership in the framework of the Horizon Europe programme.

The SNS Partnership 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. Additional information is available at https://5g-ia.eu/sns-horizon-europe/.

Within the SNS, the 5G IA will be the private side representative, jointly managing the Partnership with the EU.

The White Paper covers key areas related to 6G research from a technical, societal, policy and business perspective providing a vision for the future networks and services.

In the coming decade, 6G will bring a new era in which billions of things, humans, connected vehicles, robots and drones will generate zettabytes of digital information. 6G will enable unprecedented connectivity modes and properties that can effectively match the needs of a growing and broader range of demanding applications.

The White Paper explains how 6G is expected to play a key role in the evolution of the society towards the 2030’s, as the convergence between the digital, physical and personal worlds will increasingly become a reality. Furthermore, 6G will support the European Green Deal’s objective of reaching climate neutrality for Europe by 2050. This and other objectives of 6G will also greatly contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Key features of 6G will include intelligent connected management and control functions, programmability, integrated sensing and communication, reduction of energy footprint, trustworthy infrastructure, scalability and affordability. The development of Europe-based 6G infrastructures, solutions and services will be of key importance to secure European strategic autonomy in critical technologies and systems.

The White Paper also presents possible opportunities and obstacles related to 6G as well as a series of recommendations for both policy makers and businesses.

Dr. Colin Willcock, Chairman of the Board of the 5G IA, stated: “At this critical time, as  research beyond 5G is starting around the world, this White Paper is an important document on the road to 6G. This document encapsulates the European view on what 6G should be and indicates the direction of how we can get there”

ARIADNE White Paper ‘On communication-theoretic models for programmable wireless environments enabled by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces’

With the current deployment of the fifth-generation (5G) of communication systems, it is now a critical time to identify enabling technologies for the sixth generation (6G) of communication systems. 6G systems are expected to fulfil more stringent requirements than 5G systems, on transmission capacity, reliability, latency, coverage, energy consumption, and connection density. Existing 5G technologies, such as millimetre-wave communications, massive multi-input multi-output systems, ultra-dense heterogeneous networks, are mainly focused on the system design at the transmitter and receiver sides, and on the deployment of additional network infrastructure with power amplification and digital signal processing capabilities and backhaul availability. The purpose of currently available 5G technologies is mainly to cope with or to capitalize on often-unfavourable wireless propagation environments. In fact, the wireless environment has been conventionally modelled as an exogenous entity that cannot be controlled but can only be adapted to. According to this design paradigm, communication engineers usually design transmitters, receivers, and transmission protocols based on the specific properties of the wireless channels and for achieving desired and target performance.

Read more here.

5G PPP projects had active participation at the EuCNC & 6G Summit 2021

The conference is one of the most prominent communications and networking conferences in Europe, which efficiently brings together cutting-edge research and world-renown industries and businesses. The conference focused on various aspects of 5G communications systems and networks, including cloud and virtualisation solutions, management technologies, and vertical application areas. It will target to bring together researchers from all over the world to present the latest research results, and it is one of the main venues for demonstrating the results of research projects, especially from successive European R&D programmes co-financed by the European Commission.

The European H2020 projects 5GMETA and 5G-LOGINNOV, organized a joint workshop titled ‘Connectivity and Beyond: How the 5G Ecosystem Empowers the Port, Logistics and Automotive Industries’ on 08 June. This workshop explored the various applications of 5G, with a focus on the logistics and automotive sectors. Additionally, the 5G-LOGINNOV project was presented in a demonstration in one of the virtual exhibition booths.

More information about this workshop on 5G-LOGINNOV website.

5GZORRO organised the workshop “Blockchain-Based Zero Touch Service Assurance in Cross-Domain Network Slicing” to explain the connection between blockchain + AI + 5G/6G. Read more about 5GZORRO contribution on 30th EuCNC 2021 edition on 5GZORRO website.

At the EuCNC & 6G Summit 2021, INSPIRE-5Gplus co-organised an online workshop dedicated to automated and intelligent security. The FAST workshop – ‘From 5G to 6G Automated and Intelligent SecuriTy’ – was held on 8th June, the first day of the conference, and attracted considerable audience interest.

The workshop addressed important cybersecurity risks by discussing innovative concepts for security management of 5G networks and beyond from a holistic high-level architecture perspective. Crucial topics discussed at the workshop for reaching a fully-automated and secured 5G infrastructure included the adoption of a set of emerging trends and technologies, namely, Zero-touch network and Service Management (ZSM), Software-Defined Security (D-SEC) models, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) techniques, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), Zero Trust models, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE).

More information about this workshop on INSPIRE-5Gplus website.

5G EVE participated in the EuCNC & 6G Summit 2021 mainly with a booth in the virtual exhibition. The virtual booth titled “5G EVE Validation-Platform and Multi-Site Use-Case Deployment” attracted around 120 visitors. The booth offered information via video and brochure as well as live access to a 5G EVE expert team consisting of Rodolphe Legouable from Orange, Giada Landi from Nextworks, Luis Miguel Contreras Murillo  from Telefonica, and Javier Serrano from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

More information is available on 5G EVE website.

5G EVE multi-site gaming use case video

Go watch the video available on 5G EVE website.

White Paper On 5G-VINNI Business Layer Design

The 5G-VINNI project published the White Paper ‘5G-VINNI Business layer: design, maturity levels and rollout’.

5G-VINNI introduces the notion of 5G-VINNI Business Layer, which is a collection of BSS and OSS functions required for the operation of pre-commercial 5G testbeds and commercial 5G networks. In this white paper, we present the capabilities and design of the business layer, and a plan for the phased rollout of these capabilities along four Maturity Levels (MLs) of the 5G-VINNI facility. The MLs capture the evolution of 5G-VINNI facility: ML1 – operation for internal testing, ML2 – operation for a restricted set of customers, ML4 – outline of the long-term vision of commercial 5G-VINNI experimentation as a service. We analyse how internal and external users rank their requirements to the business layer. Thereby, we provide insights about how business layer functions should be prioritized in the rollout. In order to propose a plan for the release of the business layer capabilities, a mapping of requirements to capabilities is defined.

Read more here.

5G-Blueprint’s remote station for teleoperated driving

Teleoperation can be defined as the technology that enables humans to monitor and control vehicles from remote locations. This technology is based on a chain of high-tech devices ranging from high-speed cameras and modems to the control station itself. The primary purpose of such stations is to allow the operator to passively and remotely control autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles and, if necessary, take full control of the vehicle or machine.

To realize the core ideology of teleoperation, 5G Blueprint is currently setting up two remote teleoperation stations. These stations will be built for roadway operations allowing for full control of steering and acceleration/deceleration of the vehicle, provided that the vehicle is equipped with steer-by-wire and drive-by-wire systems. External cameras will be added to the vehicle aiding the teleoperator in visualizing the surroundings around the vehicle. The cameras’ feeds will be displayed using a three-monitor set up at the remote station. The feeds will be bandwidth-intensive so that the teleoperator can visualize the surroundings with very low latency – the connection between the station and the vehicle will use a 5G network. The remote station will also have a two-way audio channel between the vehicle environment and the operator. An extended dashboard will display task-specific information in the accompanying fleet management system and specialized applications.

Further information is available on 5G-Blueprint website.