The success of 5G technologies depends closely on their ability to attract vertical stakeholders, seeking the move of their services from cloud to the edge to meet unique KPIs. 5G-INDUCE project is based on the belief that such attractiveness requires vertical stakeholders and Network Application (nApp) developers to be able to smoothly deploy and manage applications in distributed 5G network environments, in a secure fashion and with strict KPI requirements. 5G-INDUCE relies on the deployment of an open ETSI NFV compatible 5G orchestration platform for the deployment of advanced 5G nApps. The platform’s unique features provide the capability to the nApp developers to define and modify the application requirements while the underlay intelligent OSS can expose the network capabilities to the end users on the application level without revealing any infrastructure related information. This process enables an application-oriented network management and optimization approach that is in line with the operator’s role as manager of its own facilities, while it offers the operational environment to any developers and service providers through which tailored made applications can be designed and deployed, for the benefit of vertical industries and without any indirect dependency through a cloud provider. The project focuses on the Industry 4.0 vertical sector, as one of the fastest growing and most impactful sectors in European economy with high potentials for service development SMEs and with the capability to tackle all diverse cases of service requirements. The platform is integrated over 3 5G Experimentation Facilities in Spain, Greece, and Italy, and extended with links towards specific Industries, for the showcasing of nApps in real 5G environment. The consortium includes all the required stakeholders (MNOs, Industries, System integrators and SMEs) from the benefited business sectors evaluated in the project, while significant part of the work (>50%) is conducted by innovative SMEs.

TrialsNet will deploy full large-scale trials to implement a heterogenous and comprehensive set of innovative 6G applications based on various technologies such as cobots, metaverse, massive twinning, Internet of Senses, and covering three relevant domains of the urban ecosystems in Europe identified by i) Infrastructure, Transportation, Security & Safety, ii) eHealth & Emergency, and iii) Culture, Tourism & Entertainment. There will be 13 representative use cases developed over wide coverage areas with the involvement of extended sets of real users in 4 geographical clusters, in Italy, Spain, Greece and Romania. The use cases will be transversal, each single use case will be potentially implementable over different clusters, thus allowing for a holistic evaluation of the network KPIs. Targeting to improve the “liveability” of the urban environment in the different domains, TrialsNet will also pursue the objective to i) understand where current networks are not sufficient to assure the performance needed by the use cases, and to ii) derive the new requirements for next generation mobile networks. To achieve this, TrialsNet will design and deploy platforms and network solutions with advanced functionalities based on dynamic slicing management, E2E orchestration, NFV, MEC and AI/ML methods to be trialled on 3GPP and O-RAN network architectures. Design objectives of sustainability and affordability of the deployed systems will be also treated with the highest priority. Finally, TrialsNet will also develop appropriate technical assessment frameworks mapping quantitative and qualitative measures and visualizing the dynamics of the use cases for society acceptance. Proper KVIs will be monitored, proved and refined to provide a socio-technical vision towards early adoption of 6G solutions.