News 20200212: 5TONIC HOSTS THE FINAL REVIEW OF THE HORIZON 2020 EUROPEAN PROJECT 5G TRANSFORMER

Madrid, February 12^th, 2020. Supported by a consortium of 18 industry-leading companies, the nearly three-year project 5G TRANSFORMER is part of the Horizon 2020 European Union Research and Innovation programme. The project is aimed at transforming the currently rigid mobile transport networks into a 5G dynamic system able to offer network slices tailored to the specific needs of various vertical industries. After its successful completion, 5G-TRANSFORMER is now the de-facto concept for the 5G vertical-enabled architecture. 5G-TRANSFORMER partners include 5TONIC members UC3M (which is also the project coordinator), Telefónica, Ericsson, and InterDigital.

The 5G-TRANSFORMER consortium was selected in 2018 to develop a 5G vertical industry enabled architecture, based on innovations around 3 components: (i) the Vertical Slicer (5GT-VS): offering a powerful, yet simple and flexible, interface to verticals; (ii) the Service Orchestrator (5GT-SO), capable of instantiating and orchestrating network services, including federation mechanisms; and, (iii) the Mobile Transport and computing Platform (5GT-MTP), integrating compute, storage and networking resources. The architecture is conceived to support multiple combinations of stakeholders by introducing open Application Programming Interfaces (API) among components. Through these APIs, the system hides unnecessary details from the verticals, allowing them to focus on the definition of the services and the required Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The project activities finished in November 2019. The developed solution was demonstrated and validated through vertical Proofs of Concept (PoCs) integrating multiple technology components from the partners. Real-world trials took place at sites in Madrid, Barcelona, Turin, Pisa, and Sophia-Antipolis, demonstrating fast service deployment time in the order of minutes, taking advantage of SDN and NFV concepts.

The project is also relevant for its great results in terms of dissemination, communication, and exploitation, in particular:

• 81 papers – in several prestigious journals/magazines and conferences

• 17 (Co-)organized workshops

• 27 demonstrations, including at flagship events such as EuCNC 2018 and EuCNC 2019

• 36 normative contributions feeding into key standardization specifications of ETSI NFV/MEC, 3GPP and IETF, with 25 of those accepted/approved/adopted, including the creation of a Work Item in ETSI MEC to work on network slicing

The final review was hosted by IMDEA Networks at its premises in Leganés and took place on February 4^th. For the demos that were carried out, 5TONIC provided part of the network infrastructure. One of the demos, that shows a 5G 100% automatic system that allows to reduce the time of action and minimize errors in emergency situations, involved the participation of the Madrid emergency service, SAMUR, who is a partner of the project.

The Project Officer, Ari Sorsaniemi, said: “The demo has been excellent, according to the experts, easy to understand, quite realistic. The use cases that are researched and done are fitting very well in the total picture of the current program.”