NGIoT is a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) that will create a robust and agile research, innovation and implementation agenda that will lead to unlocking the growth potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) while respecting core European values, supporting key EU policies, leveraging the key associations, and establishing a Strategy Board. The main objective of NGIoT is to mobilise effectively and provide strategic coordination of existing IoT-related stakeholders, organisations, networks, initiatives and projects in preparation of upcoming key European and national industry and research and innovation as well as implementation initiatives. NGIoT establishes a roadmap for European Internet of Things (IoT) research and innovation as well as implementation that addresses the complex situation of IoT in the world today. Furthermore, it shows a way forward based on European values, and it supports key policies such as the Digitizing European Industry (DEI) and the Digital Single Market (DSM) situating IoT in relation to the rest of the technology landscape, including security, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G, edge computing, and not least the Next Generation Internet (NGI). The NGIoT ambition reflects a realization that the landscape for deploying human-centred IoT is very dynamic, multi-sectored and multi-faceted, calling for an inclusive and innovative approach to research and innovation. In addition, the NGIoT ambition calls for an implementation strategy and orchestration that can inform and be informed by societal needs, including the need to formulate policy, to create standards and to give guidance on technical feasibility at scale across application domains. The three-year action will interconnect prominent stakeholders and initiatives in the field of IoT in a Strategy Board, supporting the digital transformation of value creation in Europe, across industries, in verticals and in civil society. Liaising between existing initiatives, organizations, sectors and stakeholders, NGIoT will deliver a cross-domain ecosystem approach to establish new directions for research and innovation as well as implementation in IoT, identifying priorities and new horizons for the period of 2020-2027.

5G!Pagoda represents the next evolution step in softwarized networks as supported by NFV, SDN and aimed at by the 5G network evolution. The top objectives of 5G!Pagoda are i) the development of a scalable 5G slicing architecture towards supporting specialized network slices composed on multi-vendor network functions, through the development of ii) a scalable network slice management and orchestration framework for distributed, edge dominated network infrastructures, and convergent software functionality for iii) lightweight control plane and iv) data plane programmability and their integration, customization, composition and run-time management towards different markets in Europe and Japan. 5G!Pagoda will develop a coherent architecture enabling research and standardization coordination between Europe and Japan. The proposed developments integrate with a common SDN/NFV based architecture and will additionally provide punctual and highly important developments of the software network architecture. The developments address the next steps of the evolution beyond the immediate NFV standardization and developments, enabling the graceful integration within end-to-end network slices of various highly customized software components, remotely controlling the data path, with specific network function flexibility and network function placement support and easy to manage through a convergent set of scalable orchestration APIs. Besides the technological aspects, 5G!Pagoda will develop a coherent proof of concept with two playground nodes, one in Japan and one in Europe, using a uniform network orchestration and a set of in-slice software features enabling the transparent exchange of knowledge and practical implemented components for dynamic deployment and execution of virtual network functions and applications. The testbed will allow practical demonstration of the functionality and will enable the development of an aligned 5G-oriented standardization roadmap for Japan and Europe

Digital Infrastructures as the future Internet, constitutes the cornerstone of the digital transformation of our society. As such, Innovation in this domain represents an industrial need, a sovereignty concern and a security threat. Without Digital Infrastructure, none of the advanced services envisaged for our society is feasible. They are both highly sophisticated and diverse physical systems but at the same time, they form even more complex, evolving and massive virtual systems. Their design, deployment and operation are critical. In order to research and master Digital infrastructures, the research community needs to address significant challenges regarding their efficiency, trust, availability, reliability, range, end-to-end latency, security and privacy. Although some important work has been done on these topics, the stringent need for a scientific instrument, a test platform to support the research in this domain is an urgent concern. SLICES ambitions to provide a European-wide test-platform, providing advanced compute, storage and network components, interconnected by dedicated high-speed links. This will be the main experimental collaborative instrument for researchers at the European level, to explore and push further, the envelope of the future Internet. A strong, although fragmented expertise, exists in Europe and could be leveraged to build it. SLICES is our answer to this need. It is ambitious, practical but overall timely and necessary. The main objective of SLICES-DS is to adequately design SLICES in order to strengthen research excellence and innovation capacity of European researchers and scientists in the design and operation of Digital Infrastructures. The SLICES Design study will build upon the experience of the existing core group of partners, to prepare in details the conceptual and technical design of the new leading edge SLICES-RI for the next phases of the RI's lifecycle.