The 2016 European Union Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS) highlights the need to enhance external policies by pursuing better communication, information-sharing, joint reporting, analysis and response planning between member state embassies, EU delegations, Commission services, EU Special Representatives and Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions. The CIVILnEXt project supports the development of a solution addressing existing “fragmentation” and closing “gaps”. To provide civilian CSDP missions with the next generation of secure and cost-effective information systems: a situational awareness, information exchange and operation control platform (OCP). Fully informed of contributing initiatives in civilian CSDP and EU external action, the project will aim to develop solutions leveraging on the results extracted from projects funded by the EU. The common challenge in CIVILnEXt is to develop, test and validate a cost-effective and interoperable operation control platform (OCP) that will support the conduct of civilian CSDP missions. The OCP will improve coordination in EU external action through better information exchange, situational awareness and operation control in diverse theaters of operation. It will support the EU’s comprehensive approach in complex missions, including the civil-military cooperation within CSDP, facilitate the engagement CSDP actors, creating links EU Delegations, FRONTEX, ECHO and other EU activities, member states, as appropriate, and other partners such as the UN and regional organisations. CIVILnEXt engages the participation of four national competent authorities, active in EU external policies and the UN organisations IOM. They share the need to become beneficiaries of procurement results that enhance the effectiveness of civilian CSDP. They are co-financing the action under one single joint procurement, supported by technical and policy advisors, with extensive CSDP experience.

5GMed5GMediaHUB aims to help EU to achieve the goal of becoming a world leader in 5G, by accelerating the testing and validation of innovative 5G-empowered media applications and NetApps from 3rd party experimenters and NetApps developers, through an open, integrated and fully featured Experimentation Facility. This will significantly reduce not only the service creation lifecycle but also the time to market barrier, thus providing such actors that are primarily from SMEs, with a competitive advantage against their rivals outside EU. In particular, 5GMediaHUB will build and operate an elastic, secure and trusted multi-tenant service execution and NetApps development environment based on an open cloud-based architecture and APIs, by developing and integrating a testing and validation system with two existing well-established 5G testbeds (by CTTC and Telenor) for enabling the fast prototyping, testing and validation of novel 5G services and NetApps. 5GMediaHUB will offer: (i) a DevOps environment for Testing as a Service; (ii) a rich set of Experimentation Tools that offer scheduling, validation, verification, analytics and QoS/QoE monitoring mechanisms; (iii) A set of re-usable vertical-specific and vertical-agnostic NetApps with easy to use APIs that can be consumed by application developers, reducing the complexity and risk of integrations and operations; (iv) a re-usable open-source NetApps Repository; (v) an umbrella cross-domain service orchestrator to deliver cross-domain orchestration of NetApps; (vi) an innovative security framework offering software defined perimeter protection and isolation of NetApps; (vii) incremental validation capabilities of the Experimental Facility evidenced through 3 novel media use cases with 2 scenarios each, over 3GPP R.16 and R.17 5G testbed releases. Our 17-partner consortium (9 SMEs) from 9 countries has extremely rich 5G-PPP experience, since 13 partners have participated in previous 5G-PPP projects and in several 5G-PPP WGs.

The 6G Smart Networks of the future will provide the high-performance and energy-efficient infrastructure on which next generation internet and other services can be developed and deployed. 6G will foster an Industry revolution and digital transformation and will accelerate the building of smart societies leading to quality-of-life improvements, facilitating autonomous systems, haptic communication and smart healthcare. To achieve the aforementioned objectives in a sustainable way, it is well understood that new approaches are needed in the way the telco infrastructures are architected, federated and orchestrated. These new approaches call for multi-stakeholder ecosystems that promote synergies among MNOs and owners of all kinds or computational and networking resources that will share the extraordinary costs of yet another generation upgrade from 5G to 6G, while facilitating new business models. It is clear, that the new architecture paradigms bring unprecedented complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved, that should be matched by equally capable automation capabilities, thus 6G is aiming for the “holy grail” of pervasive AI-driven intelligence, termed as Native AI. However, the multi-stakeholder infrastructures foreseen in 6G as per the “network of networks” concept, will add a level of unprecedented management complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved. 6G-INTENSE aims to abstract and federate all kinds of computational and communication resources under an internet-scale framework, that is governed by an intelligent orchestration paradigm, termed as DIMO.