The 5G era will offer diverse services and applications beneficial to societies in Europe and Japan, such as connected cars, eHealth, smart factory, and public safety. The development of the air interfaces (AIs) have followed to paths: the evolutionary path and the revolutionary path. This leads to a variety of possible AIs. An operator will only own a subset of the overall suite of AIs, increasing the need to enhance network performance significantly. Considering these needs, the focus of the 5G-Enhance project is on the definition and evaluation of interoperable 5G eMBB and efficient network solutions in dense area. 5G-Enhance will develop, plan and execute large scale trial activities on actual testbeds in EU and Japan. 5G-Enhance will execute two large scale trials with eMBB in crowded environments (dense area) to show the feasibility of the applications based on 5G network. The focus is on two specific applications in the context of enabling healthy lifestyle: The first application is 3D remote class for a real-time surgery that will be implemented in the Demo-1 (Trial 1).The second application is ad-hoc outdoor sport event to be implemented in the Demo-2 (Trial 2). The two demonstrations have different requirements. Demo-1, requires very high data rate, and supporting many users with low mobility and Demo-2 requires high data rate and supporting a massive number of users with high mobility. Integrated trial between Japanese and European partners will demonstrate the interoperability between Japanese and European facilities. 5G-Enhance will develop innovative mobile broadband technologies in order to enhance existing solutions towards better provision of 5G KPIs in dense eMBB scenarios. 5G-Enhance employs two key components, namely flexible and scalable network design and implementation and enhanced spectrum resource management.

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.

The ECO-eNET project will perform foundational research on emerging transmission technologies, to form a new confluent edge network that brings together optical and radio transport to scale to new levels of efficiency and capacity for 6G, by integrating confluent front-/mid-/back-haul (xhaul) with cell-free and distributed multiple-input multiple-output based access networks. The combination of photonic radio fixed wireless and free space optical transmission is used for fixed wireless connections, enabling the creation of an edge mesh network. New monitoring and slice-aware control protocols will unify the radio intelligent controllers with the transport software defined networking to efficiently deliver high-capacity flex grid wavelength multiplexed signals over standard single mode fibre and the fixed wireless links. Radio signals can be flexibly processed at different split phy points throughout the network or remain in analog radio over fibre format end-to-end. The unique ECO-eNET combination of wired and wireless transport is further exploited for wireless control of the wired network segments, enhanced clock synchronization, and optical space and wavelength switching, groomed over FlexE ethernet. AI layer controls are added to orchestrate the federation of edge processing and splitting of AI models for optimum efficiency in executing user applications and smart network control functions. The ECO-eNET project brings together an interdisciplinary team of industry and academic partners to explore the full potential of these important emerging technologies to support the capacity, ultra-high energy efficiency, low latency, and robustness needed in 6G networks.

BeGREEN will take a holistic view to propose evolving radio networks that not only accommodate increasing traffic and services but also consider power consumption as a factor. Determining the metrics by which power consumption should be included is a key feature which will be studied as first stage of the project. This will include not only the cost of the energy but also societal factors. BeGREEN will evaluate different mechanisms by which power consumption could be reduced based on the following pillars: At the architecture level, planning and evaluation of a massive MIMO included RAN design to achieve flexible and energy efficient connectivity considering spectrum utilisation, interference mitigation and architecture/processing complexity. At the hardware and infrastructure level, radio-unit controlling schemes will be used in power amplifiers energy optimisation. Also, an offloading engine for hardware acceleration will be employed to achieve energy efficiency when performing radio access functions and network function virtualisation. At the link level, the integrated sensing techniques are used to provide a better estimate of the impact of the radio channel toward improvements in spectral efficiency against the increased power consumption associated with the resulting calculations. At the system level, the project pursues the development and evaluation of AI-based procedures to adapt the energy consumption of softwarised network functions, aiming to minimize the overall consumed energy according to the utilisation patterns of network. BeGREEN proposes an “Intelligent Plane”, as an additional plane along with user plane and data plane, that allows the data, model and inference to be seamlessly exchanged between network functions. BeGREEN will use O-RAN as the baseline architecture, due to new/suitable interfaces and protocols it can provide, to be used for the movement of data around the network to the appropriate location for performance and efficiency assessments. In addition, the disaggregation, virtualisation and network and service management capabilities inherent in O-RAN provide the mechanisms to realise many of the infrastructure changes and techniques for energy optimisation pursued in BeGREEN. BeGREEN will use AI/ML techniques to provide solutions for reducing the required calculations and to recognise patterns in the system level data associated with the behaviour of the user-base and to learn the most appropriate response to this behaviour in terms of both network performance and energy consumption. In this scheme, impact of the location of the AI/ML operations within the network on the performance of the approach, the consumption of power and the ability to share resources between different operations will be considered. BeGREEN technologies will be showcased in three demonstrations. At IHP premises, the joint communications and sensing techniques toward efficient resource allocation and optimised power consumption. The project targets using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for energy saving scenarios in the demonstrations. Furthermore, two major project demonstrations will be performed at BT premises in Adastral park. First, the ‘Intelligent Plane’ implemented using ORAN rApps and xApps will be demonstrated on a network emulator. Then, the project final integrated demonstrator using the Adastral testbed facilities to showcase BeGREEN technology innovations.

6G-SENSES proposes the integration of novel 6G RAN technologies such as Cell-Free (CF) Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS) to support the 6G vision that is sustained by the current (and future) architectural framework based on 3GPP and O-RAN. The project considers a multi-technology RAN ecosystem with technologies that are able to offer sensing functionalities. These technologies are Sub-6, Wi-Fi, millimeter wave and 5G NR, which will coexist in a JCAS framework whose goal is to retrieve as much information as possible from the surrounding environment to improve energy efficiency, reduce power consumption and favour communication at high data rates. Additionally, some of these technologies will be amenable to be integrated in the first implementation of a fully distributed CF-mMIMO scheme using mmWave and Sub-6 technologies. WIth the aim to enhance availability and coverage and to improve sensing performance, will leverage Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) making use of the distributed nature of the access points and availability of multiple antennas. An optimization of distributed signal processing and resource allocation schemes tailored for RIS-assisted CF network architecture is proposed. This framework will make use of new PHY technologies to increase the cooperation among access points and their inherent capabilities to improve the precision/accuracy of the sensing capabilities. Sensing information stemming from these technologies will be pushed to the O-RAN framweork for optimization purposes using the Radio Intelligent Controllers (RICs). A total of three Proof-of-Concept demonstrations will be showcased, which encompass the proposed objectives of the project in a single infrastructure.