5G takes its second wind towards the full global 5G standard, the commitment of the Verticals, and convincing demos by 5G PPP. The Winter Olympics and MWC’18 will likely see flourishing 5G trials and a number of interesting announcements.
2017 was very busy for both 5G PPP Phase 1 and Phase 2 projects. Some of the notable achievements include PoCs (Flex5Gware, Fantastic-5G, 5G-Crosshaul, 5G-Ex, Speed-5G, Coherent), METIS-II Visualisation Platform, 5G-ENSURE consultation on 5G security.
5GPPP Phase 2 projects leverage knowledge from various 5G PPP phase 1 projects including: SESAME for 5G ESSENCE, 5G-NORMA and METIS-II for 5G MoNArch, SONATA for 5G TANGO, COgNet, SELFNET and5GEx for SLICENET, Flex5GWare for MATILDA, 5G-XCast 5GCITY, 5G MEDIA and 5G TANGO,5G-ENSURE and CHARISMA for NRG-5, Superfluidity, VirtuWind, SONATA and SESAME for NGPaaS….
On 23 January 2018, the 1st SliceNet Advisory Board Meeting took place in Sophia Antipolis, France. The purpose of the meeting was to present the plans and results of the project to the Advisory Board members and get their feedback.
Advisory Board Members
The seven participating Advisory Board members included (see photo, from left to right): Michael Fitch, BT; Linus Thrybom, ABB Corporate Research; Toon Norp, TNO; Marco Liebsch, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH; Rui Aguiar, University of Aveiro; Jane Zheng, Ulster University; and Klaus Martiny, Deutsche Telekom AG. They brought a wide diversity of expertise and perspectives to the meeting, from network management to vertical sector application in the energy sector and the healthcare domain.
Eight more Advisory Board members didn’t manage to fit the meeting into their busy schedules: Pål Grønsund, Telenor; Valentin Voinica, City of Alba Lulia Municipality; Dimitra Simeonidou, University of Bristol; Oscar Lazaro, Innovalia Association; Pascal Bisson, Thales Services; Anand R. Prasad, NEC; Jim Leahy, OGCIO; and João Peças Lopes, INESC/ FEUP.
Topics discussed
After a project overview by project coordinator Maria Barros from Eurescom and a presentation on SliceNet’s technical vision by Qi Wang from the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), the participants discussed the definition of slices and the project’s overall approach to network slicing.
In the second part of the meeting, more detailed presentations from the work packages led to a productive exchange on concrete activities of the project.
The presentation by Pedro Miguel Neves from Altice Labs on SliceNet’s overall architecture was followed by a summary of use cases by Ana Cristina Aleixo from infrastructure service provider EFACEC. Dean Lorenz from IBM Vision explained their concept for intelligent/cognitive network management, and finally, Rui Calé from Altice Labs presented SliceNet’s plans and activities for contributing to standardisation. Advice on the latter point was particularly concrete, as two of the participating Advisory Board members are leading standardisation groups – Toon Norp is chairing the 3GPP SA1 and Klaus Martiny the new ETSI working group ZSM.
The project consortium will now follow up on the numerous productive comments by the Advisory Board members and come back to them with further questions. In order to get also the opinions of the Advisory Board members who could not participate this time, the project team will organise the next Advisory Board meeting as a Web conference in Q2/2018.
On Dec 14th 2017, the SLICENET team held a Workshop with ETSI ISG ENI (Industry Standards Group – Experiential Networked Intelligence). This workshop was hosted by ENI in London, and unveiled possibilities for collaboration between the Standards Group and the SliceNet Project in the area of cognition-based Network Management.
The ENI/EU H2020 SliceNet Workshop addressed AI-based Network Slicing Management and investigated the options for technical co-operation between SLICENET and ENI. The workshop was a great success with almost 50 people attending. It was agreed by both parties to cooperate and a series of inter-management team conference calls were agreed. The proof of concept was discussed and further discussions are in the offing in the future.
The Phase 3 (Part.I) Pre-structuring Model Version 2.0 has been released by the 5G IA and presented by Didier Bourse, Chair of the 5G-PPP Technology Board, at the ICT Proposers’ Day 2017 on 9 November in Budapest. It is available for download here.
In Phase 1 of the 5GPPP Infrastructure Public-Private-Partnership, 15 “Golden Nugget” projects were reviewed by the European Commission at the end of the first year. Read here about these Golden Nugget projects. 15 Golden Nuggets for 5G PPP phase 1 projects
The SliceNet project has just kicked off a three year project with its first face-to-face meeting in Heidelberg, Germany in June 2017. With 15 partners from all over Europe comprising industrial partners, academic institutions and research centres and small to medium size enterprises, this project is set to address some of the most challenging parts of the 5G Manifesto, that of network slicing.
5G network slicing could be considered as one of the most important innovations in communications of the decade. The SliceNet project will set up a framework to meet the challenging requirements from the management and control planes of network slicing. This will allow for maximizing the sharing of network resources and a high-degree of flexibility for network operators and business users. It will facilitate diverging requirements from diverse vertical businesses and operational capabilities and offer configurable warranties in Quality of Service (QoS) and/or Quality of Experience (QoE). This will open a significant number of new markets and enable a wide range of demanding, divergent and innovative use cases.
SliceNet is focused on 5G Smart Grid (self-healing), 5G eHealth (ambulance) services and 5G Smart City (IoT) as the primary use cases to contribute to Utilities/Energy, Health and Smart City sectors, which are expected to generate an annual benefits of 6.47 billion, 5.53 billion and 8.1 billion Euros respectively in EU in 2025 from employing 5G. 5G was identified by the European Commission (EC) in the Horizon 2020 programme, especially the 5G-PPP initiative and EC-supported studies. Moreover, the EC has highlighted these sectors as top societal challenges for Horizon 2020 and as key action points in the 5G for Europe Action Plan.
The industrial partners in the project are Eurescom, Germany; Altice Labs, Portugal; Ericsson Telecommunicazioni, Italy; IBM, Israel; OTE, Greece; Orange, Romania; EFACEC Energia, Portugal; and Dell EMC, Ireland. The research and academic institutions are University of the West of Scotland, UK; Eurecom, France; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain; and CIT Infinite, Ireland. The SMEs are Nextworks, Italy; RedZinc, Ireland; and Creative Systems Engineering, Greece.
The SliceNet project has just kicked off a three year project with its first face-to-face meeting in Heidelberg, Germany in June 2017. With 15 partners from all over Europe comprising industrial partners, academic institutions and research centres and small to medium size enterprises, this project is set to address some of the most challenging parts of the 5G Manifesto, that of network slicing.