SUSTAIN-6G will develop a holistic sustainability framework in the context of 6G, addressing all three sustainability areas (environmental, societal, economic), and factors impacting sustainable 6G technology and 6G technology for improving verticals’ sustainability. The framework will be applied to key vertical sectors, in an end-to-end manner, considering the full lifecycle of assets. SUSTAIN-6G will identify the cross-points between what sustainability needs are, which challenges 6G and verticals need to consider, what 6G should do to address these challenges, and how society and economy benefit from responsible innovation. To achieve this, the project will provide a driving force for multiple activities and a hub, to integrate research and innovation from previous and ongoing projects, develop innovative concepts and solutions, and address gaps and trade-offs in technology, processes and methodologies. The concepts and solutions will be validated and evaluated by proof-of-concepts on their sustainability impact and performance. The insights from these PoCs, and the proven processes and methodologies will be consolidated into guidelines, best practices and roadmaps to drive the full integration of sustainability aspects into future communication and vertical systems, in close collaboration with stakeholders and other SNS projects, and for use across the EU and beyond. The outputs and impact of SUSTAIN-6G will provide the foundation for industry-wide standardisation that will enhance existing ecosystems, help to shape a sustainable future that develops and thrives within planetary boundaries, and strives to protect and restore the environment, while respecting EU values and rules. Recognising the complexity and multifaceted characteristics of sustainability, SUSTAIN-6G will achieve these objectives through its multidisciplinary consortium, composed of 6G and vertical technology, social science, and economic experts, and with relevant external stakeholders.

Motivation: The expected diversity of services and use cases in 5G requires a flexible, adaptable, and programmable architecture. While the design of such an architecture has been addressed by 5G-PPP Phase 1 at a conceptual level, it must be brought into practice in Phase 2. To this end, 5G-MoNArch will (i) evolve 5G-PPP Phase 1 concepts to a fully-fledged architecture, (ii) develop prototype implementations and (iii) apply these prototypes to representative use cases. Approach: 5G-MoNArch architecture design will combine Phase 1 concepts (such as virtualisation, slicing and orchestration of access and core functions) with three enabling innovations that fill gaps not ad-dressed in Phase 1: (i) inter-slice control and cross-domain management, to enable the coordination across slices and domains, (ii) experiment-driven optimization, to leverage experimental results to design highly performing algorithms, and (iii) cloud-enabled protocol stack, to gain flexibility in the orchestration of virtualised functions. Testbeds: The devised architecture will be deployed in two testbeds: (i) the sea port, representative of a vertical industry use case, and (ii) the touristic city, representative of a mobile operator deployment. For each testbed, 5G-MoNArch will instantiate the architecture and complement it with a use case specific functionality – the two functional innovations of 5G-MoNArch: (i) resilience and security, needed to meet the sea port requirements, and (ii) resource elasticity, to make an efficient use of the resources in the touristic city. Impact: 5G-MoNArch has a very high potential for commercial impact, including enhanced products (e.g., orchestrators or edge-cloud RAN), novel services (enabled by network slicing) and opportunities for new market players. To exploit this potential, 5G-MoNArch has elaborated a thorough and realistic innovation plan that includes patents and standards.

5G-TOURS will deploy full end-to-end trials to bring 5G to real users for thirteen representative use cases. The project will provide efficient and reliable close-to-commercial services for tourists, citizens and patients in three different types of cities: (i) Rennes, the safe city where e-health use cases will be demonstrated; (ii) Turin, the touristic city focused on media and broadcast use cases; and (iii) Athens, the mobility-efficient city that brings 5G to users in motion as well as to transport-related service providers. These services will not only improve the quality of life for citizens and tourists, but also represent an important business opportunity as they address industry segments accounting for more than 50% of the estimated revenues generated by verticals. The fundamental feature of the 5G-TOURS concept is the dynamic use of the network to seamlessly provide different types of services adapted to the specific needs of individual use cases. 5G-TOURS will enable different capabilities such as network slicing, virtualisation, orchestration or broadcasting as well as additional features developed by the project to bring more flexibility and improved performance. The ambition is to fully demonstrate pre-commercial 5G technologies at a large scale, showing the ability of the 5G network to meet extreme and conflicting KPIs while supporting very diverse requirements on the same infrastructure. The 5G-TOURS mobile network system will integrate strategic components of the ecosystem, including the network infrastructure, terminals and end-devices, the vertical solutions enabled by 5G, and the vertical customers receiving the services. 5G-TOURS has devised a thorough evaluation plan to scrutinise the viability of the use cases, addressing technical performance by analysing both network service KPIs and application-level KPIs, economic impact by analysing the estimated generated revenues and, ultimately, the satisfaction of the vertical customers.

The key objective of 5G NORMA is to develop a conceptually novel, adaptive and future-proof 5G mobile network architecture. The architecture is enabling unprecedented levels of network customisability, ensuring stringent performance, security, cost and energy requirements to be met; as well as providing an API-driven architectural openness, fuelling economic growth through over-the-top innovation. With 5G NORMA, leading players in the mobile ecosystem aim to underpin Europe’s leadership position in 5G. Relevant to strands "Radio network architecture and technologies" and "Convergence beyond last mile", the 5G NORMA architecture will provide the necessary adaptability able to efficiently handle the diverse requirements and traffic demand fluctuations resulting from heterogeneous and changing service portfolios. Not following the ‘one system fits all services’ paradigm of current architectures, 5G NORMA will allow for adapting the mechanisms executed for a given service to the specific service requirements, resulting in a novel service- and context-dependent adaptation of network functions paradigm. The technical approach is based on the innovative concept of adaptive (de)composition and allocation of mobile network functions, which flexibly decomposes the mobile network functions and places the resulting functions in the most appropriate location. By doing so, access and core functions no longer (necessarily) reside in different locations, which is exploited to jointly optimize their operation when possible. The adaptability of the architecture is further strengthened by the innovative software-defined mobile network control and mobile multi-tenancy concepts, and underpinned by corroborating demonstrations. 5G NORMA will ensure economic sustainability of network operation and open opportunities for new players, while leveraging the efficiency of the architecture to do so in a cost- and energy- effective way.