5G-SOLUTIONS is a 5G-PPP project supporting the EC’s 5G policy by implementing the last phase of the 5G cPPP roadmap. It aims to prove and validate that 5G provides prominent industry verticals with ubiquitous access to a wide range of forward-looking services with orders of magnitude of improvement over 4G, thus bringing the 5G vision closer to realisation. This will be achieved through conducting advanced field-trials of innovative use cases, directly involving end-users across five significant industry vertical domains: Factories of the Future, Smart Energy, Smart Cities, Smart Ports, Media & Entertainment. In particular, 5G-SOLUTIONS will provide: (a) validation of more than 140 KPIs for 20 innovative and heterogeneous use cases that require 5G performance capabilities and that are expected to have a high future commercialisation potential. These use cases will be field trialled separately as well as concurrently with real end-user actors through ICT-17’s 5G-EVE and 5G-VINNI facilities, thus validatin

Cloud innovations have had a major impact on the IT industry but not yet on networks. The danger is that 5G will be a niche industry providing basic connectivity for the cloud applications and services boom. The NGPaaS project envisages 5G as: a build-to-order platform, with components, features and performance tailored to a particular use case; developed through a “Dev-for-Operations” model that extends the IT industry’s DevOps approach to support a multi-sided platform between operators, vendors and verticals; and with revised Operational and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) to reflect the new parameters and highly dynamic environment. NGPaaS can enable 5G to become central to a cooperative future with cloud developers, by removing the technological silos between the telco and IT industries. NGPaaS builds on 5G-PPP phase 1 projects and lays the foundation for large-scale phase 3 deployments and industrial usage, through a stepped validation of several Telco, IoT/vertical and combined scenarios culminating in a live test in Paris-Saclay campus that can incorporate innovative SMEs selected for showcasing NGPaaS’s operational, service and business benefits.

Virtualisation and software networks are a major disruptive technology for communications networks, enabling services to be deployed as software functions running directly in the network on commodity hardware. However, deploying the more complex user-facing applications and services envisioned for 5G networks presents significant technological challenges for development and deployment. SONATA addresses both issues. For service development, SONATA provides service patterns and description techniques for composed services. A customised SDK is developed to boost the efficiency of developers of network functions and composed services, by integrating catalogue access, editing, debugging, and monitoring analysis tools with service packaging for shipment to an operator. For deployment, SONATA provides a novel service platform to manage service execution. The platform complements the SDK with functionality to validate service packages. Moreover, it improves on existing platforms by providing a flexible and extensible orchestration framework based on a plugin architecture. Thanks to SONATA’s platform service developers can provide custom algorithms to steer the orchestration of their services: for continuous placement, scaling, life-cycle management and contextualization of services. These algorithms are overseen by executives in the service platform, ensuring trust and resolving any conflict between services. By combining rapid development and deployment in an open and flexible manner, SONATA is realising an extended DevOps model for network stakeholders. SONATA validates its approach through novel use-case-driven pilot implementations and disseminates its results widely by releasing its key SDK and platform components as open source software, through scientific publications and standards contributions, which, together, will have a major impact on incumbent stakeholders including network operators and manufacturers and will open the market to third-party developers.

5G will realise a true Internet of Things, a network capable of supporting potentially trillions of wireless connected devices and with overall bandwidth one thousand times higher that today’s wireless networks. Current 4G technology is approaching the limits of what is possible with this generation of radio technology and to address this, one of the key requirements of 5G will be to create a network that is highly optimised to make maximum use of available radio spectrum and bandwidth for QoS, and because of the network size and number of devices connected, it will be necessary for it to largely manage itself and deal with organisation, configuration, security, and optimisation issues. Virtualisation will also play an important role as the network will need to provision itself dynamically to meet changing demands for resources and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), the virtualising of network nodes functions and links, will be the key technology for this. We believe that Autonomic Network Management based on Machine Learning will be a key technology enabling an (almost) self administering and self managing network. Network software will be capable of forecasting resource demand requirements through usage prediction, recognising error conditions, security conditions, outlier events such as fraud, and responding and taking corrective actions. Energy efficiency will also be a key requirement with the possibility to reconfigure the NFV to for example avail of cheaper or greener energy when it is available and suitable. Again this is directly related to usage prediction both at a macro level, across an entire network, and at a micro level within specific cells. The Cognet proposal will focus on applying Machine Learning research to these domains to enable the level of Network Management technology required to fulfil the 5G vision.

Superfluidity is “a state in which matter behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity”. Our project aims at achieving superfluidity in the network: the ability to instantiate services on-the-fly, run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation, edge) and shift them transparently to different locations. The SUPERFLUIDITY project tackles crucial shortcomings in today’s networks: long provisioning times, with wasteful over-provisioning used to meet variable demand; reliance on rigid and cost-ineffective hardware devices; daunting complexity emerging from three forms of heterogeneity: heterogeneous traffic and sources; heterogeneous services and needs; and heterogeneous access technologies, with multi-vendor network components. The SUPERFLUIDITY solution is based on: a decomposition of network components and services into elementary and reusable primitives; a native, converged cloud-based architecture; the virtualization of radio and network processing tasks; platform-independent abstractions, permitting reuse of network functions across heterogeneous hardware platforms, while catering to the vendors’ need for closed platforms/implementations; and high performance software optimizations along with leveraging of hardware accelerators. As a result, the 5G network will benefit from: i) location-independence: network services deployable in heterogeneous networks; ii) time-independence: near instantaneous deployment and migration of services; iii) scale-independence: transparent service scalability; and iv) hardware-independence: development and deployment of services with high performance irrespective of the underlying hardware. Through these properties, SUPERFLUIDITY will provide a converged cloud-based 5G concept that will enable innovative use cases in the mobile edge, empower new business models, and reduce investment and operational costs. The SUPERFLUIDITY consortium gathers an impressive and uncommon blend of Telco and IT players that can make its vision a reality.