Ubiwhere has been commercialising a low-cost, seamless and straightforward-to-install system entitled Smart Parking, composed of vehicle-detection electromagnetic sensors and an intelligent software platform to collect and process all the data. Through this system, parking operators can enhance their ongoing operations by knowing in every instance what is happening and by analysing reports on the behavioural patterns detected by the platform, improving their operational and enforcement efficiency. The potential market of Parking has increased the number of competing solutions in this sector (despite the lack of a market leader), composed of both ICT startups and well-established companies. With so many competitors, and taking into account that several cities have started to dismantle the spaces reserved for parking in their urban areas, Ubiwhere intends to enrich its Smart Parking platform with urban planning capabilities, unlocking a new business opportunity and consequently standing out from its competitors. QPARK aims at up-scaling the current Smart Parking solution, enriching it with a new service (feature) that enables the generation of reports via a thorough analysis of which areas of the city are more affected by certain events and how that sudden increase in people affects the city traffic and the parking occupancy. The FET Open project QUANTICOL will support this what-if analysis by providing the necessary tools and mechanisms to advance in the problem space and provide useful knowledge quickly. QPARK will allow Ubiwhere, a software company focused on Smart Cities and Communities, to disrupt the global market by enriching its solutions with urban planning capabilities, powered by complex adaptative systems developed in QUANTICOL.

Even though the potential of 5G technology is well known, having it massively deployed and available to end-users is not an easy task. To unlock all of 5G’s use cases at scale, smaller radio equipment and antennas (Small Cells) must be deployed in a dense manner across closer to end users. However, there is a catch: it is currently very difficult for MNOs to be able to deploy this equipment at scale, within public spaces. Thus, a major obstacle must be overcome to ultimately unlock massive deployments and adoption: a common platform connecting both Infrastructure Owners (such as, but not limited to, Municipalities) and entities which are in dire need of having proper licensing and authorisation to install new or exploit readyto-be-used 5G equipment, easing the process for site acquisition, asset and network management, in the most transparent and simple way. 5GaaS intends to develop and launch a new product in the form of a decentralised marketplace for the telecom ecosystem, under a new Joint Venture. This new platform is the culmination of three major components, two of them currently already available in the market : a centralised marketplace for site leasing and tenant management, from Ubiwhere, and dRAX, from Accelleran, an interoperable, standards-based and software-focused implementation of 5G networks. The other innovative component will come out of H2020 5GCity project, to which 5GaaS partners have collaboratively contributed to by building an automated 5G network slicing engine for Neutral Hosts. 5GaaS expands these layers, implementing a decentralised marketplace connecting the whole 5G value-chain of stakeholders such as MNOs, site owners, system integrators and hardware and software vendors, using blockchain technology. During the project, the consortium will focus on pilot activities to showcase the benefits and capabilities of said platform, having it deployed across a total of 25 sites, in 5 different European cities.

EMBERS will bring to market a back-end for smart city mobility that is developed by a European small enterprise based upon its smart parking and smart traffic management products that two municipalities in Portugal currently deploy. The Mobility Back-end as a Service (MBaaS) replaces such all-in-one systems, in which a municipality purchases the full set of components from a single vendor. Instead, the city manager can purchase best-of-breed devices and apps developed by third parties, with the only constraint being that they interoperate with the back-end via a free, open, smart city mobility API. This domain-specific API lowers barriers to entry for app and device developers, making it easier for innovative SMEs to enter the market. Furthermore, the API is offered via a variety of generic interfaces, including oneM2M, ETSI M2M, OMA LWM2M, and FIWARE NGSI. EMBERS thus clears the way for developers and to municipalities that have adopted any one of these potential emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) communication standards. Beyond its primary goal of bringing the MBaaS to market, EMBERS will stimulate development of an entire ecosystem around the MBaaS smart city mobility API. Separating out the back-end from the other components will, however, require rigorous testing. EMBERS will experiment with the system on two testbeds that are part of the FIRE+ OneLab facility: the FUSECO Playground, for M2M communications, and FIT IoT-LAB, for wireless sensor devices. EMBERS will host a hackathon and an app challenge to bring in third party developers. The project will also include three demonstrators by third parties via an open call. These activities will contribute back to FIRE+ by demonstrating successful experimentation by SMEs developing close-to-market products. The project will also conduct real world pilots in two or more cities as a final step in bringing the MBaaS to market.

Cloud computing is transitioning from a few large data centres to a truly decentralized computing paradigm. Computing resources are increasingly provided near the network edge, in a geographically distributed way, in the form of so-called fog nodes. Data produced in end devices like smartphones, sensors or IoT devices can be stored, processed and analysed across a continuum of compute resources, from end devices via fog nodes to cloud services. This decentralized computing paradigm provides huge benefits in terms of reduced latency, increased processing speed and energy savings, but the protection of sensitive data in such a widely decentralized setting becomes a critical concern. FogProtect delivers new and advanced architectures, technologies, and methodologies for ensuring end-to-end data protection across the computing continuum, from cloud data centres through fog nodes to end devices. The FogProtect solutions are generic and can be used in multiple contexts to support many types of applications and services. FogProtect combines four main technology innovations: (1) secure data container technology for data portability and mobility, (2) data-protection-aware adaptive service and resource management, (3) advanced data protection policy management, (4) dynamic data protection risk management models and tools. Three complementary real-world use cases demonstrate the applicability of FogProtect solutions to multiple contexts and the impact of the project’s novel solutions for data protection: smart cities, smart manufacturing and smart media. FogProtect provides the essential building blocks to empower data protection, supporting resilience, trustworthiness and human-centricity in the Next Generation Internet. FogProtect brings together knowledge and solutions of major European ICT providers together with competence of innovative SMEs and deep technical knowledge of leading research organizations, ensuring it has high scientific, technological and economic impact.