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.

In the global race towards 5G, the establishment and implementation of the 5G-PPP programme in the EU has significantly strengthened the position of Europe, promoting both technological excellence and industrial leadership. So far, 5G-PPP Phase 1 and Phase 2 projects have been proven quite successful in developing focused solutions, targeting specific technical innovations. Now, the crucial next step in the “Genesis of 5G”, in Europe but also worldwide, is to integrate all these highly diverse results and technologies in order to “glue together” the 5G picture and unveil the potential of a truly full-stack, end-to-end 5G platform, able to meet the defined KPI targets. In this context, the main goal of 5GENESIS to validate 5G KPIs for various 5G use cases, in both controlled set-ups and large-scale events. This will be achieved by bringing together results from a considerable number of EU projects as well as the partners’ internal R&D activities in order to realise an integrated End-to-end 5G Facility, built on five diverse in terms of capabilities –yet fully interoperable- experimentation platforms distributed across Europe and interconnected with each other. The platforms will emerge as the evolution of existing testbeds, already owned and operated by the 5GENESIS partners, suitable for large-scale field experimentation. The 5GENESIS Facility, as a whole, will: - implement and verify all evolutions of the 5G standard, via an iterative integration and testing procedure; - engage a wide diversity of technologies and chain innovations that span over all domains, achieving full-stack coverage of the 5G landscape; - unify heterogeneous physical and virtual network elements under a common coordination and openness framework exposed to experimenters from the vertical industries and enabling end-to-end slicing and experiment automation; and - support further experimentation projects, in particular those focused on vertical markets.