As 5G approaches a very high maturity level, the testing and validation of the innovations achieved in 5G by integrators and verticals service providers has become of utmost importance. Verticals have very different needs, such as the case of the Automotive industry and Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR). This will therefore require different levels of support in taking their applications and services from concepts, to prototypes and finally to products. However, it is also more and more frequent that services in different verticals need to exchange data, particularly mobility services such as those found in connected automobiles and PPDR. 5GASP aims at shortening the idea-to-market process through the creation of a European testbed for SMEs that is fully automated and self-service, in order to foster rapid development and testing of new and innovative NetApps built using the 5G NFV based reference architecture. Building on top of existing physical infrastructures, 5GASP intends to focus on innovations related to the operation of experiments and tests across several domains, providing software support tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) of VNFs in a secure & trusted environment for European SMEs capitalizing in the 5G market. 5GASP targets the creation of an Open Source Software (OSS) repository and of a VNF marketplace targeting SMEs with OSS examples and building blocks, as well as the incubation of a community of NetApp developers assisted with tools and services that can enable an early validation and/or certification of products and services for 5G. We focus on inter-domain use-cases, development of operational tools and procedures (supporting day-to-day testing and validation activities) and security/trust of 3rd party IPR running in our testbeds.

5G-Xcast will devise, assess and demonstrate large scale immersive media delivery by means of conceptually novel wireless technologies, contributing to the further definition of 5G and its standardisation. 5G-Xcast will focus on large scale media distribution, as this use case is one of the most demanding requirements in terms of data rate (capacity), scalability (cost-effectiveness) and ubiquity (coverage). The 5G-Xcast media delivery solution will have built-in unicast/multicast/broadcast modes and caching capabilities. The project will take a holistic approach in order to harmonize media delivery across the three communication modes being considered, and to provide a seamless user experience, as well as common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to content service providers. The project will cover multiple disciplines from the radio interface to the transport and application layers, including protocols and APIs, as well as network and system architecture aspects. The development of the 5G-Xcast media delivery solution will be focused on the Media and Entertainment (M&E) vertical. The automotive, Internet of Things and public safety verticals will be considered to ensure that their respective technical requirements are also identified and suitably addressed. Proof-of-concept prototypes and technology demonstrators are pivotal tasks of the project. Special emphasis will be given to emerging new immersive media services that cannot be efficiently delivered by existing technologies and networks. 5G-Xcast will enable progressive convergence in the media delivery sector while optimising the resources of the available infrastructures, enabling new business models over fixed, mobile and broadcast networks that will be also investigated in the project. The consortium is a balanced combination of telecom and media entities, covering the complete M&E value chain, with a very strong presence in 5G-PPP phase-1 and 3GPP standardization of 4G Broadcast.