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.

During the last decades, supply chains have become huge networks of heterogeneous organisations involved in the manufacturing and delivery of products to end users. The appearance of IoT is transforming every sector subject to be digitalized. After a period of evaluation of the use of IoT, companies are now moving to complete digitalization of their supply chains. Under this paradigm, iNGENIOUS (Next-GENeration IoT sOlutions for the Universal Supply chain) will exploit some of the most innovative and emerging technologies in line with the standardised trend, contributing to the Next-Generation IoT (NG-IoT) and proposing technical and business enablers to build a complete platform for supply chain management. iNGENIOUS embraces the 5G Infrastructure Association (5G IA) and Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) vision for empowering smart manufacturing and smart mobility verticals. The iNGENIOUS network layer brings new smart 5G-based IoT functi¬onalities, federated Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) nodes and smart orchestration, needed for enabling the projected real-time capable use cases of the supply chain. Security and data management are fully recognized as important features in the project. iNGENIOUS will create a holistic security architecture for next-generation IoT built on neuromorphic sensors with security governed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and tile-based hardware architectures based on security by design and isolation by default. In the application layer, iNGENIOUS new AI mechanisms will allow more precise predictions than conventional systems. Project outcomes will be validated into 4 large-scale Proof of Concept demonstration, covering 1 factory, 2 ports, and 1 ship, encompassing 6 uses cases. iNGENIOUS is formed by 21 partners from eight countries, including three telecom vendors and manufacturers, two network operators, four logistics partners, two universities, three research institutes and seven high-tech SMEs.

The success of 5G technologies depends closely on their ability to attract vertical stakeholders, seeking the move of their services from cloud to the edge to meet unique KPIs. 5G-INDUCE project is based on the belief that such attractiveness requires vertical stakeholders and Network Application (nApp) developers to be able to smoothly deploy and manage applications in distributed 5G network environments, in a secure fashion and with strict KPI requirements. 5G-INDUCE relies on the deployment of an open ETSI NFV compatible 5G orchestration platform for the deployment of advanced 5G nApps. The platform’s unique features provide the capability to the nApp developers to define and modify the application requirements while the underlay intelligent OSS can expose the network capabilities to the end users on the application level without revealing any infrastructure related information. This process enables an application-oriented network management and optimization approach that is in line with the operator’s role as manager of its own facilities, while it offers the operational environment to any developers and service providers through which tailored made applications can be designed and deployed, for the benefit of vertical industries and without any indirect dependency through a cloud provider. The project focuses on the Industry 4.0 vertical sector, as one of the fastest growing and most impactful sectors in European economy with high potentials for service development SMEs and with the capability to tackle all diverse cases of service requirements. The platform is integrated over 3 5G Experimentation Facilities in Spain, Greece, and Italy, and extended with links towards specific Industries, for the showcasing of nApps in real 5G environment. The consortium includes all the required stakeholders (MNOs, Industries, System integrators and SMEs) from the benefited business sectors evaluated in the project, while significant part of the work (>50%) is conducted by innovative SMEs.

FUDGE-5G aims to create a new generation of world leading 5G core network technology companies for private 5G networks based in Europe. FUDGE-5G will make a leap forward in realizing the notion of cloud-native 5G private networks by developing a further enhanced Service-Based Architecture (eSBA) for both control plane and user plane with “decomposed” players of the ecosystem divided into: New Radio (NR) access network infrastructure provider, eSBA platform provider, mobile 5G Core (5GC) provider, vertical application orchestration provider and vertical service provider. The forward-looking FUDGE-5G architecture will also feature “all-Ethernet” 5GLAN (Local Area Network), 5G-TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking), 5G-Multicast and intelligent vertical application orchestration features. The proposed framework enables highly customized cloud-native deployment of private 5G networks. FUDGE-5G will accelerate the (inevitable) shift to a fully software-based 5G core network by offering a disintegrated environment where components, both in control and user plane, can be deployed anywhere as micro-services (i.e., edge, on premises and cloud), being agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. This softwarization exposing 5G NR HW to third parties will enable the usage of off-the-shelf commodity HW to deliver additional cost savings, faster deployments and ultimately greater adoption for private networks. The consortium has been carefully built around several innovative high-tech small and medium European vendors for virtualized 5GC and service orchestration solutions and applications. They will be able to integrate, test and validate their 5G technical solutions over the premium end-to-end 5G NR facility provided by a major European MNO in several innovative use cases for private networks under real-life operational conditions with prominent vertical stakeholders. State-of-the-art eSBA capabilities will be offered by large vendors.

The imminent need of deploying advanced communication and autonomous driving capabilities in vehicles is turning the race towards the realization of the so called fifth generation new radio (5G NR) networks into a real odyssey for the European automotive industry. The challenges arising from the coexistence of MIMO systems on vehicles, the growing number of sensors and radars and cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) in the realm of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications are piling up. Many of them have not been solved yet due to the lack of qualified personnel with joint expertise in communications and sensing technologies. Thus, the acute need of the proposed ITN-5VC project, a European Industrial Doctorate (EID) training network, arises. ITN-5VC aims to investigate the key problems of the integration of multi-band multi-antenna communications, including mmWave, with radar heads and other wireless sensors into the same telematics unit, so that transmission chains and radiation systems were efficiently reused in a cost-efficient manner while delivering the required performance. Multiple antenna deployment, joint operation and performance of the resulting automotive solution will be investigated by 11 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) working with top industrial manufacturers and academia in Europe. The training will tackle three main topics: • Vehicular communications integrated with radar sensors for the sake of simplified telematics. • Improved antenna and phased array technology deployment on the vehicle’s body or surface. • Efficient protocol integration on V2X-specific system on chips for joint communication and sensing deployment on vehicles. ITN-5VC will apply a new training Programme that follows the EU principles for Innovative Doctoral Training. Additionally, ITN-5VC training will apply short term missions, periodic challenges and an ECTS credit competition to boost the participation and engagement of the students to the Programme.