Even though the potential of 5G technology is well known, having it massively deployed and available to end-users is not an easy task. To unlock all of 5G’s use cases at scale, smaller radio equipment and antennas (Small Cells) must be deployed in a dense manner across closer to end users. However, there is a catch: it is currently very difficult for MNOs to be able to deploy this equipment at scale, within public spaces. Thus, a major obstacle must be overcome to ultimately unlock massive deployments and adoption: a common platform connecting both Infrastructure Owners (such as, but not limited to, Municipalities) and entities which are in dire need of having proper licensing and authorisation to install new or exploit readyto-be-used 5G equipment, easing the process for site acquisition, asset and network management, in the most transparent and simple way. 5GaaS intends to develop and launch a new product in the form of a decentralised marketplace for the telecom ecosystem, under a new Joint Venture. This new platform is the culmination of three major components, two of them currently already available in the market : a centralised marketplace for site leasing and tenant management, from Ubiwhere, and dRAX, from Accelleran, an interoperable, standards-based and software-focused implementation of 5G networks. The other innovative component will come out of H2020 5GCity project, to which 5GaaS partners have collaboratively contributed to by building an automated 5G network slicing engine for Neutral Hosts. 5GaaS expands these layers, implementing a decentralised marketplace connecting the whole 5G value-chain of stakeholders such as MNOs, site owners, system integrators and hardware and software vendors, using blockchain technology. During the project, the consortium will focus on pilot activities to showcase the benefits and capabilities of said platform, having it deployed across a total of 25 sites, in 5 different European cities.

An optical network, like any system, has to be observable before it can become controllable and be subject to optimization, and this is the first capability ORCHESTRA introduces. ORCHESTRA’s high observability relies on information provided by the coherent transceivers that are extended, almost for free, to operate as software defined multi-impairment optical performance monitors (soft-OPM). Information from multiple soft-OPMs are correlated using network kriging and statistical estimation methods to infer information for unmonitored or un-established paths, effectively support alien wavelength, and localize QoT problems and failures. High rate optical transmission with coherent detection promises to address the continuous growth of Internet traffic. However, the current control and monitoring (C&M) infrastructure is absolutely not adequate to support this growth. In ORCHESTRA, a new C&M architecture that exploits the monitoring and reconfigurability capabilities of enhanced tubable transceivers will be designed, implemented and validated. The network is viewed as a continuously running process that perceives current conditions, decides, and acts on those conditions. ORCHESTRA’s advanced cross-layer optimization procedures will be implemented within a new specifically designed library module, called DEPLOY. A new dynamic and hierarchical C&M infrastructure will be then created to interconnect the multiple soft-OPMs and the proposed virtual and real C&M entities running the DEPLOY algorithms. At the top of the hierarchical infrastructure, a novel OAM Handler prototype will be implemented, as part of the SDN-based ABNO architecture. The proposed C&M infrastructure will be enriched with active-control functionalities, closing the control loop, and enabling the network to be truly dynamic and self-optimized. The ORCHESTRA solutions are planned to be industrialized, given the expected improvements in service level validations, CAPEX, energy consumption and OPEX.