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.

The 6Green project aims to conceive, design, and realize an innovative service-based and holistic ecosystem, able to extend “the communication infrastructure into a sustainable, interconnected, greener end-to-end intercompute system” and promote energy efficiency across the whole 5/6G value-chain. The ultimate objective is to enable and to foster 5/6G networks and vertical applications reducing their carbon footprint by a factor of 10 or more. To achieve this objective, the project will exploit and extend state-of-the-art cloud-native technologies and the B5G Service-Based Architecture with new cross-domain enablers to: 1) boost the global ecosystem flexibility, scalability and sustainability, and 2) enable all the 5/6G stakeholders (from the ones acting at the infrastructure and network platform to vertical industries) reducing their carbon footprint by becoming integral parts of a win-win green-economy business, and meeting a Decarbonization Service Agreement. The 6Green intent-based cross-domain interactions among stakeholders will allow achieving a tight proportionality between the time-varying and geographically distributed mobile workload produced by vertical applications and network slices, and the energy/carbon footprint induced to the 5/6G network and computing infrastructure continuum. 6Green will provide stakeholders with flexible and green Artificial Intelligence mechanisms that will allow propagating the environment impact to any players acting on virtual domains, and triggering zero-touch operations according to customizable energy- and carbon-aware policies, allowing to optimally use renewable energy sources. The project will also deliver three future-proof use-case applications that will provide a diverse awareness of the green capabilities of the 6Green platform, and that will demonstrate the potential 5/6G impact in enabling other vertical industry sectors to reach the carbon neutrality targeted by the European Green Deal.

5G-LOGINNOV will focus on seven 5G-PPP Thematics and support to the emergence of a European offer for new 5G core technologies in 11 families of use cases. 5G-LOGINNOV main aim is to design and innovative framework addressing integration and validation of CAD/CAM technologies related to the industry 4.0 and ports domains by creating new opportunities for LOGistics value chain INNOVation. 5G-LOGINNOV is supported by 5G technological blocks, including new generation of 5G terminals notably for future Connected and Automated Mobility, new types of Internet of Things 5G devices, data analytics, next generation traffic management and emerging 5G networks, for city ports to handle upcoming and future capacity, traffic, efficiency and environmental challenges. 5G-LOGINNOV will deploy and trail 11 families of Use cases beyond TRL7 including a GREEN TRUCK INNITIAVE using CAD/CAM & automatic trucks platooning based on 5G technological blocks. Thanks to the new advanced capabilities of 5G relating to wireless connectivity and Core Network agility, 5G-LOGINNOV ports will not only significantly optimize their operations but also minimize their environmental footprint to the city and the disturbance to the local population. 5G-LOGINNOV will be a catalyst for market opportunities build on 5G Core Technologies in the Logistics domains, thus being a pillar of economic development and business innovation and promoting local innovative high-tech SME and Start-Ups. 5G-LOGINNOV will open SMEs’ and Start-Ups’ door to these new markets using its three Living Labs as facilitators and ambassadors for innovation on ports. 5G-LOGINNOV promising innovations are key for the major deep sea European ports in view of the mega-vessel era (Hamburg, Athens), and are also relevant for medium sized ports with limited investment funds (Koper) for 5G.

Int5Gent targets the integration of innovative data plane technology building blocks under a flexible 5G network resource, slice and application orchestration framework, providing a complete 5G system platform for the validation of advance 5G services and IoT solutions. The project builds upon a suite of innovative 5G technological solutions spanning hardware, software, and networking systems that have been conceptualized and developed under the latest 5GPPP initiative projects and are now taken to TRL-7 and above. It also combines novel and state-of-the-art solutions able to further upgrade the capabilities and maturity level of cutting-edge 5G core technologies enabling the creation of an innovative 5G ecosystem. A sample of the developed and offered technologies include flexible multi-RAT baseband signal processing, beam steering, mmWave technology solutions at 60GHz and 150GHz bands, hardware-based edge processor with TSN, GPU processing capabilities, innovative 5G terminals and elastic SDN-based photonic data transport. The integration of the technology blocks is performed as part of an overall 5G architecture that promotes edge processing and is orchestrated by an NFVO compatible framework with edge node extensions at the network layer and an overlay vertical services application orchestrator at the user plane layer. The overall platform is implemented in two extended testbeds which include actual field deployed segments and managed by the network operators of the consortium. The validation and showcasing testbeds host 3 use case scenarios covering the deployment of services related to multiple vertical sectors as well as innovative applications for smart IoT networked devices. The use cases are designed in order to highlight the benefits of the adopted technologies in terms of increased bandwidth, low latency and high reliability and create new markets opportunities especially for the participating SMEs through pilot validation of their offered solutions.

5G-IANA aims at providing an open 5G experimentation platform, on top of which third party experimenters (i.e., SMEs) in the Automotive-related 5G-PPP vertical will have the opportunity to develop, deploy and test their services. An Automotive Open Experimental Platform (AOEP) will be specified, as the whole set of hardware and software resources that provides the compute and communication/transport infrastructure as well as the management and orchestration components, coupled with an enhanced NetApp Toolkit tailored to the Automotive sector. 5G-IANA will expose to experimenters secured and standardized APIs for facilitating all the different steps towards the production stage of a new service. 5G-IANA will target different virtualization technologies integrating different MANO frameworks for enabling the deployment of the end-to-end network services across different domains (vehicles, road infrastructure, MEC nodes and cloud resources). 5G-IANA NetApp toolkit will be linked with a new Automotive VNFs Repository including an extended list of ready to use open accessible Automotive-related VNFs and NetApp templates, that will form a repository for SMEs to use and develop new applications. Finally, 5G-IANA will develop a distributed AI/ML (DML) framework, that will provide functionalities for simplified management and orchestration of collections of AI/ML service components and will allow ML-based applications to penetrate the Automotive world, due to its inherent privacy preserving nature. 5G-IANA will be demonstrated through 7 Automotive-related use cases in 2 5G SA testbeds. Moving beyond technological challenges, and exploiting input from the demonstration activities, 5G-IANA will perform a multi-stakeholder cost-benefit analysis that will identify and validate market conditions for innovative, yet sustainable business models supporting a long-term roadmap towards the pan-European deployment of 5G as key advanced Automotive services enabler.