The exponential growth of mobile traffic, drastically increasing of network complexity, and the strong need for inter-network coordination of wireless network resources call for breakthroughs in control, coordination and flexible spectrum management in 5G heterogeneous radio access networks. The COHERENT project aims to address these problems by researching, developing and validating a novel control framework for future mobile networks. The key innovation of COHERENT is to develop a unified programmable control framework to coordinate the underlying heterogeneous mobile networks as a whole. The COHERENT control framework has two unique features to deal with the insufficiency of current control solutions for inter-network coordination. First, theories and methods to abstract the low layer network states and behaviors of different underlying mobile networks are developed, which provides a simplified but sufficient abstracted network view for network-wide control and resource coordination. Network abstraction will significantly reduce the signaling overhead, making scalable network-wide control solutions feasible, and enable more flexible spectrum management, which are key for the success of 5G networks. Second, based on the abstracted network view, common interfaces and software-development kits will be developed to enable programmability in controlling and coordinating heterogeneous mobile networks. The programmable control will provide operators a flexible and cost efficient way to implement new control functions and thus to support new services. The innovative impact of the COHERENT project is in enabling a unified control and coordination framework for heterogeneous mobile networks by combining innovative approaches on abstraction of low layers in underlying mobile networks, software defined networking, and flexible spectrum management. COHERENT will build a true proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate the applicability and benefits of its approach.

European mobility is drastically changing: growing urbanisation, environmental aspects, and safety are only a few of the key indicators pointing in this direction. Road infrastructures and vehicles are blending with the digital world, becoming always-connected, automated and intelligent, delivering optimal experience to passengers, and addressing societal goals (e.g., emission and accident reduction) and economic needs (e.g., vehicles as smart-living environments). In this respect, the European Union pushes for large-scale collaborative cross-border validation activities on cooperative, connected and automated mobility. 5G-CARMEN addresses these challenges harnessing the concept of “Mobility Corridors”. In 5G-CARMEN important European industries, academics and innovative SMEs commit to achieve world-wide impact by conducting extensive trials across an important corridor (by people/goods traffic volumes), from Bologna to Munich, spanning 600 km of roads, connecting three European regions (Bavaria, Tirol and Trentino/South-Tyrol) across three countries. Vehicle manoeuvre negotiation (at various levels of automation), infotainment, and emission control in sensitive areas are the cross-border use cases targeted by 5G-CARMEN pilots in order to maximise the project commercial, societal, end environmental impact. The project will build a 5G-enabled corridor to conduct cross-border trials and will deploy a mixture of 5G micro- and macro-cells for ubiquitous C-V2X connectivity. The 5G New Radio will be used to support latency sensitive and/or bandwidth hungry services and applications. The project will leverage on a distributed mobile edge cloud spanning from the vehicle itself to the centralised cloud. Multi-tenancy and neutral host concepts will be leveraged upon to deliver a final platform capable of enabling new business models. 5G-CARMEN will complement C-V2X with LTE and C-ITS technologies, targeting interoperability and harnessing a hybrid network.