Current research efforts on 5G Radio Access Networks (RAN) strongly focus on mmWave access to realize enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services. However, there are many unsolved issues to deploy mmW ave 5G RAN. The most critical issue is backhauling since it is infeasible to provide 10 Gigabit Ethernet backhaul everywhere. Meanwhile, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) have obtained much attention in 5G networks as a key technology to enable mission-critical (low latency) applications by allocating storage and computation resources at the edge of the network and circumvent the backhaul networks’ limited capacity. However, in the case of mobile networks, it is not easy to reallocate computational resources on demand, while meeting the strict latency constraints foreseen in 5G networks. In this project, mmWave access and MEC are firstly combined as a perfect couple of technologies compensating each other’s weakness. The new system is called mmWave edge cloud (MiEdge) henceforth. To facilitate MiEdge, the second main goal of the project is to develop a new cellular network control plane in which context information (location, traffic, classes of applications, etc.) of users are collected and processed to forecast traffic and users’ requests, in order to enable a proactive resource allocation. This novel control plane is called liquid RAN C-plane, since the services and connections can follow users like a liquid. Lastly, the users or application providers orchestrate MiEdge to create a user/application centric 5G network that supports both eMBB and mission-critical applications. In summary, MiEdge project will develop a feasible 5G ecosystem by combining MiEdge, liquid RAN C-plane, and user/application centric orchestration. The project will contribute to the standardization of mmWave access and liquid RAN C-plane in 3GPP and IEEE. At the end, the project will demonstrate a joint 5G test-bed in the city of Berlin and 2020 Tokyo Olympic Stadium.

Air pollution is a major problem for public health. According to WHO outdoor air pollution kills 4 million people, mostly in cities, every year. That’s more than HIV, malaria and influenza combined. Air pollution is estimated to cost approximately 2% of Gross Domestic Product in developed countries and 5% in developing countries. The problem is only increasing with the unprecedented population growth in cities. In Europe, over one in four and one-third of cities surpass the legal limits set by the EU legislation regarding NO2 and PM10 respectively, pollutants that affect seriously the respiratory system. However, current air quality monitoring stations in cities are spatially very limited due to the high capital and operative expenditures. Consequently, a small number of them are installed in cities mainly used just for air quality regulation. Bettair is a Platform as a Service that permits, for the first time with low investment, to really map air an noise pollution in cities on a previously unimaginable scale based on a large deployment of outstandingly accurate gas sensors by using an advanced post-processing algorithm. The network of autonomous devices is installed in streetlights (or similar) in a dense matrix and assist cities to i) identify unknown pollution sources, and ii) to assess the impact of different environmental actions to identify the most effective ones. Thus, providing unique insights and allowing better decisions to mitigate air pollution and reduce individual exposure. We need the FTI project to internationally bring to market the developed technology, from a prototype to a product, by industrialising the hardware and scaling-up the platform. Two big and two small pilots will be carried out in order to demonstrate the accuracy, the performance, and the benefits of using such a system. The consortium has 2 innovative EU SMEs Bettair Cities and Omniflow; 2 big corporates CISCO and Telecom Italy; and a leading health research centre, ISGlobal.

Information technology has driven, directly or indirectly, much of Europe’s economic growth during the last decades as the role of data transitioned from the support of business decisions to becoming a good in itself. An open approach towards data value creation has become critical in the new networked economy, with Europe well placed to nurture this new revolution. However, to date Europe’s data economy has yet to achieve the same levels of growth as those in the US and Asia. Data Pitch will seek to address this critical gap by creating a transnational, Europe-wide data innovation ecosystem that will bring together data owners and Big Data technology providers, with startups and SMEs with fresh ideas for data-driven products and services. Our project will: - explore the critical factors that impact the way organisations create value from sharing data; - organise a competition addressing economic, societal, and environmental challenges, present and future, to identify promising digital innovators and data-empowered solutions; - create a cross-sectoral, secure data experimentation facility which will offer the winners of this competition a purposeful environment to nurture their ideas; and - support them by solving common concerns through funding, technical, legal, marketing, and commercial assistance. Drawing on the experience from key players in the consortium, we will establish a European Data Innovation Lab (DIL), guided and promoted by the hugely visible engagement channels and commentators at the Guardian and an international network of hundreds of organisations that have already confirmed their intention to join forces with and support Data Pitch. Together with them we will make the European data economy stronger and help the region re-gain leadership in innovation through digital transformation.

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.