AGENDA

9:30-11:00 Vertical Use Cases for 5G Private Network

Presentations

• 5G-ACIA: Shaping the Industrial 5G Revolution (Xueli An, Huawei, 5G-ACIA)
• 5Growth NPN Deployment Solutions & Industry 4.0 Pilot Examples (Xi Li, NEC, 5Growth
• 5G NPNs for Process Monitoring (Niels König, Fraunhofer IPT, 5G-SMART)
• Autonomous Edge 5G Private Network Requirements for Smart Factories (Nikolaos Tzanis, University of Patras, 5G-VICTORI)

Coffee Break

11:30-13:00 Vertical Use Cases for 5G Private Networks

Presentations

• 5G-enabled AGVs for NPN Production Lines in Manufacturing (Manuel Fuentes, Fivecomm, 5G-INDUCE)
• 5G for Military Use (Kennet Noland, Norwegian Defense Material Agency, 5G-VINNI+FUDGE-5G)
• On the Role of 5G NPNs for Mission Critical Services (Ki Won Sung, KTH, PriMO-5G)
• The role of 5G Non-Public Networks for Media Production (Jordi J. Gimenez, EBU, 5G-RECORDS)

Lunch

 14:00-15:30 Operation of 5G Private Networks

Presentations

• Outlook for operator adoption of 5G Private Networks (Jose Ordonez-Lucena, Telefonica, 5G-VINNI+5Growth+5G-Clarity)
• High-Tech and Affordable 5G Private Network Roll-Out to Every Corner (Sergio Gonzalez, Atos, Affordable 5G)
• Towards efficient 5G NPN Readiness and Testing, addressing the Industry 4.0 challenges of SMEs (Hakon Lonsethagen, Telenor, 5G-Solutions)
• Operation of 5G NPNs: Industry Sector Considerations for Deployment and Sustainability (Simon Fletcher, Real Wireless, 5G-TOURS)

Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Emerging Technologies for 5G Private Networks

Presentations

• Seamless integration of TSN into 5G NPNs for Industry 4.0 (Jose Costa, Cumucore, 5G-SMART+FUDGE-5G+5G-RECORDS)
• Cloud Deployments of 5G NPNs: the Athonet Connectivity Platform (Daniele Munaretto, Athonet, FUDGE-5G)
• Cloud Native Service-Based Architecture Deployment Considerations for NPNs: An Evolution of NFV (Sebastian Robitzsch, InterDigital, FUDGE-5G)
• Making (Virtualized) Service Interactions More Flexible Within and Across 5G Private Networks (Dirk Trossen, Huawei, FUDGE-5G)

Registrations to EuCNC/6G Summit’s are now open on its official website – The workshops’ list is available at: https://www.eucnc.eu/workshops/

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Partners Nemergent Solutions SL and Athonet were both present on the exhibition’s floor with booths showcasing Affordable5G’s promotional material, engaging visitors interested in their respective solutions designed for the field, which also connect to their work within the project.

One of the solutions demonstrated by Nemergent revolved on MCX Scaling Mechanisms, which are integral part of Affordable5G’s emergency communication pilot: the company also shot on location and shared online a brief video on the demonstration, serving as summary of the showcase’s contents (The video is available here).

Athonet was proud to present its tactical solutions for critical communications, while advertising all European projects in which they participate and have a focus on PPDR and critical communications, Affordable5G included: the project’s introductory video was shown to the booth’s visitors. Athonet’s solutions for private networking and critical communications attracted the attention of experts from Europe, Asia and South America visiting the booth.

The post A Brief Report from Critical Communications World 2022 appeared first on Affordable5G project.

On 16 June 2022, the EU-funded projects 5G-LOGINNOV, FUDGE-5G, and Affordable5G jointly organised an online workshop entitled “Accelerating 5G Innovation in Europe”.

During the workshop, the projects presented their work addressing challenges and opportunities for private networks, focusing on CAD, transport & logistics, smart cities, and manufacturing. The goal of the workshop was to discuss and contribute to the debate about the advancement in the adoption of 5G technologies in several sectors.

The online event started with an introduction session with Peter Schmitting (ERTICO-ITS Europe Manager interoperability and standardisation), Prof. Panagiotis Trakadas (Affordable5G Technical Manager), and Prof. David Gomez-Barquero (FUDGE-5G Coordinator). Hereafter, the three projects gave an overview of their technical progress: 5G-LOGINNOV presented three Living Lab Use Cases based in Athens, Hamburg, and Koper. Affordable5G then presented its technical achievements related to the applicability of Machine Learning techniques in the Radio Access Network part of 5G and RAN Optimsation through control loop automation for private networks. Finally, FUDGE-5G introduced its use cases for 5G private networks and its platform architecture.

The workshop concluded with a panel discussion among Prof. Panagiotis Trakadas, Prof. David Gomez-Barquero, and Pavlos Basaras (5G-LOGINNOV, Athens Living Lab, ICCS).

The whole Affordable5G team thanks the 5G-LOGINNOV and FUDGE-5G colleagues as well as the 30 event attendees for making the workshop a success! In case you missed the workshop, you can watch it here below:

The post Insights from the 5G-LOGINNOV, FUDGE-5G, and Affordable5G joint technical workshop appeared first on Affordable5G project.

From 8 – 10 June 2022 the two European Commission Horizon 2020 projects FUDGE-5G and Affordable5G organised a booth at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC) – and the joint 6G Summit – taking place in Grenoble, France. The projects demonstrated their latest innovations in 5G private networks, enjoying high interest from the conference participants keen on learning about the projects’ objectives and achievements.

Affordable5G showcased its latest project outcomes and developments in its quest to create a high-tech and affordable 5G network roll-out spanning across several fields. At the booth, video presentations and other informational material were available to visitors, and the research partners presented a paper entitled “Towards Closed-loop Automation in 5G Open RAN: Coupling an Open-Source Simulator with xApp” (Check out the presentation here).

Affordable5G Coordinator Josep Martrat from Atos was, amongst others, present at the booth and explained the project’s aims and mission in a short video interview. You can watch it here below:

The FUDGE-5G demonstration focused on its SBA platform, which implements the Service Communication Proxy and offers cloud-native location-aware orchestration of 5G Cores. Utilising the SBA capabilities, the first part of the demonstration allows to deploy 5GC on-premise and have it operational with a gNB within two minutes. This is then mixed with a hybrid deployment where the UPF is located on premise and all other required 5GC NFs in the cloud. The third deployment, instead, has the entire 5GC in the cloud. All on-premise deployments utilise the same SBA platform. For all three deployments, a Vertical Health Monitoring application was orchestrated on-premise allowing to demonstrate the functional readiness of all 5GCs.

The post Affordable5G at the EuCNC and 6G Summit 2022 appeared first on Affordable5G project.

Affordable5G gets on the EC Innovation Radar once again, with two innovation and three of our partners being highlighted by the platform. Read about our previous mentions here.

The Radar’s analysis this time targeted Affordable5G’s “Implementation of new Time Sensitive Networking over 5G” and “3GPP-compliant mission critical systems over neutral host and hybrid deployment” – The features were both recognised as “key innovations” and placed under the Radar’s “Exploring” market maturity category, which gathers solutions in early phases of technological readiness, but already showing high commitment levels from the organisations developing them.

The innovations’ specific market maturity rating and partners involved

Implementation of new Time Sensitive Networking over 5G was developed within the project by partners ADVA and RunEL – which now enter the list of “key innovators” for their efforts – rating “High” in the market maturity criteria of the Radar – More information on their categorisation can be found here.

3GPP-compliant mission critical systems over neutral host and hybrid deployments – a key component for Affordable5G’s “emergency communication” use case, and the project’s connection with 3GPP – is the result of Nemergent Solutions‘ work, which also joins the partners among the “key innovators” with a solution deemed by the radar as “addressing the needs of existing markets”.

About Innovation radar

For those who might not have followed our previous news: the Innovation Radar platform builds on the information and data gathered by independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission. These experts also provide an independent view regarding the innovations in the projects and their market potential (more information about the Innovation Radar methodology is available here).

The aim is to make information about EU-funded innovations from high-quality projects visible and accessible to the public via the platform. This shows citizens the many excellent technological and scientific advances being delivered by researchers and innovators around Europe, funded on their behalf by the European Commission. This initiative has the support of EU Members States and, to date, Ministers from 23 countries have signed the Innovation Radar declaration confirming their support for this initiative.

The post More Affordable5G Innovation Radar highlights! appeared first on Affordable5G project.

The EC initiative and platform singles out Affordable5G’s achievements and partners once again: this time the Radar has analysed and highlighted as “key innovation” our end to end intelligent orchestration and slice management.

Read about our previous Innovation Radar mention here

The analysis thus recognised yet another Affordable5G feature as “addressing the needs of existing markets”, placing it in the Radar’s “Exploring” market maturity category: this includes innovations actively exploring value creation opportunities, considered as ‘getting things started’. The Radar defines such innovations as being in the early phases of technological readiness, but already showing high commitment levels from the organisations developing them. Alternatively, this category includes concrete market-oriented ideas, which depend on further progressing on technology development process.

This marks another important validation checkpoint for the project, and, in this case, in particular for project partners i2CAT, Accelleran and Nearby Computing, which now join the “key innovators” for their collaborative work developing the feature.

For those who might not have followed our previous news: the Innovation Radar platform builds on the information and data gathered by independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission. These experts also provide an independent view regarding the innovations in the projects and their market potential (more information about the Innovation Radar methodology is available here).

The aim is to make information about EU-funded innovations from high-quality projects visible and accessible to the public via the platform. This shows citizens the many excellent technological and scientific advances being delivered by researchers and innovators around Europe, funded on their behalf by the European Commission. This initiative has the support of EU Members States and, to date, Ministers from 23 countries have signed the Innovation Radar declaration confirming their support for this initiative.

The post Affordable5G’s “end to end intelligent orchestration and slice management” and more project partners featured on EC Innovation Radar appeared first on Affordable5G project.

The EC initiative and platform analysed the OSM (Open Source MANO) enhancement for flexible cloud native service deployments – developed within the project – as “key innovation”.

Read more about our the Open Source MANO feature here

The analysis recognised Affordable5G’s OSM feature as addressing the needs of existing markets, placing it in the Radar’s “Exploring” market maturity category: this includes innovations actively exploring value creation opportunities, considered as ‘getting things started’. The Radar defines such innovations as being in the early phases of technological readiness, but already showing high commitment levels from the organisations developing them. Alternatively, this category includes concrete market-oriented ideas, which depend on further progressing on technology development process.

This marks another important achievement for the whole consortium, and in particular for Martel Innovate, which has been working alongside the OSM developers to develop this feature, and has been identified as “key innovator” through EC’s analysis.

The Innovation Radar platform builds on the information and data gathered by independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission. These experts also provide an independent view regarding the innovations in the projects and their market potential (more information about the Innovation Radar methodology is available here).

The aim is to make information about EU-funded innovations from high-quality projects visible and accessible to the public via the platform. This shows citizens the many excellent technological and scientific advances being delivered by researchers and innovators around Europe, funded on their behalf by the European Commission. This initiative has the support of EU Members States and, to date, Ministers from 23 countries have signed the Innovation Radar declaration confirming their support for this initiative.

The post Affordable5G’s Open Source MANO feature and partner Martel Innovate singled out by EC Innovation Radar appeared first on Affordable5G project.

Over 61.000 total attendees took part at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022 in Barcelona (Spain) to hear and showcase the latest advancements in 5G and mobile technologies.

According to the GSMA, this is the mobile momentum: 5G connections will surpass 1 billion in 2022 and 2 billion by 2025. By the end of 2025, 5G will account for over a fifth of total mobile connections, and more than two in five people globally will live within reach of a 5G network.

To this end, the Affordable5G project is at work to roll out a high-tech and affordable 5G network to every corner. Read more about our vision and objectives.

Several of our partners joined this leading initiative and met face-to-face with key stakeholders form the mobile and tech industries. Atos, Accelleran, Athonet, Cellnex, Nearby Computing, and RunEL were present on the exhibition floor to showcase Affordable5G demos, results and next steps.

Don’t miss the developments of the Affordable5G project, subscribe to our newsletter.

The post It’s the Mobile Momentum: Affordable5G Takeaways from MWC 2022 appeared first on Affordable5G project.

MWC Barcelona is a key networking opportunity for the mobile and tech industries, attracting some of the most influential decision-makers. Over 2.000 leading companies will attend and share their insights on future connectivity trends.

Meet the Affordable5G partners

The Affordable5G consortium could not miss this opportunity! Come to meet the Affordable5G partners at the MWC 2022 and receive first-hand insights on the project results and next steps.

In hall 2, stand 2C32, Atos (the project coordinator) will host a demo of Affordable5G AI-control loop for radio parameters optimisation, declared as a xApp in RT-RIC according to O-RAN disaggregation scheme.

Moreover, for the entire duration of MWC 2022, you can ask further questions to our partners present as exhibitors on the showfloor: RunEL (hall 6 – 4YFN, stand 6C8.3), Nearby Computing (hall 4, stand 4B150, together with Cellnex), and Accelleran (hall 7, stand 7G51).

Project partner Athonet will be presenting demos in some of their clients’ booths: Parallel Wireless (hall 5, booth 5C61), Vodafone (hall 3, booth 3E11), and Amazon Web Services (hall Conference Center CC1).

Affordable5G is looking forward to meeting you all!

For more information on MWC: https://www.mwcbarcelona.com/

The post AFFORDABLE5G AT MWC 2022 appeared first on Affordable5G project.

Affordable5G contributes Kubernetes Network Function (KNF) placement feature to OSM

While OSM allows for the deployment of containerised applications on a Kubernetes cluster, it does not allow to define the placement configuration for the deployed services, such as the ability to deploy services on specific nodes within the Kubernetes cluster topology. Currently, placement configuration can be covered within application packages, like Helm charts or Juju bundles, but not all packages support this configuration and the variables used for the configuration are not consistent across packages, reducing the possibility for tools like OSM to control such placement in a uniform way.

Supporting arbitrary placement of Cloud Native Functions in OSM in a uniform way, it is important to better support Kubernetes in a full Cloud to Edge scenario. Certain services need to be deployed at the Edge, and for that to be ensured, the specific nodes at the Edge need to be easily targeted for deployment. Ultimately, uniforming the placement control is a first step to allow tools on top of OSM to automatically govern the placement of cloud native functions based on real-time monitoring data.

Open source as an innovation pathway

As project partner of the Affordable5G project, Martel has been working alongside the OSM developers to develop this feature, allowing for placement configurations to be provided natively for any application regardless of its package’s configuration. By working directly with the OSM open source community, Affordable5G ensures that this feature will become part of the official OSM releases, thus ensuring its long-term availability and support. This means providing a useful feature for both Affordable5G and the ETSI OSM community as a whole. Martel is a strong believer of open source approaches and, despite the additional effort required to reach consensus in the community, the Swiss company believes that making process compliant and community-driven contributions to open source is a key innovation pathway for European projects as Affordable5G.

Other ongoing efforts: Infrastructure as Code for OSM

To complement this feature, Martel is also working to enhance the deployment of OSM VNFs with an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach. This entails committing a series of files that describe VNFs into a Git repository, and, through an operator, sync the deployed VNFs with their configuration in the repository. This approach allows developers to treat an infrastructure like application code: pushing changes to a repository that are reflected onto the actual deployment, rolling back changes that could potentially break functionality, and so forth.

Both the placement feature and this IaC approach complement each other to provide useful advancements for OSM and the Affordable5G project.

The post Affordable5G develops new features for ETSI OSM with the aim to increase OSM support for Cloud Native approaches appeared first on Affordable5G project.