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Description
While the Internet of Things is revolutionizing our society at an unprecedented pace, more recent research and development and industrial innovation focus is shifting towards the new direction of massive Internet of Things, which refers to the 10''s of billions of devices, objects, and machines that require ubiquitous connectivity at a density of 1 million devices per square kilometer. Massive Internet of Things raises high challenges for future communication networks and data processing. The emergent 5G technology with slicing capabilities can offer a stronger and more flexible networking support for Massive Internet of Things and for special applications (e.g. maritime services.) .Another technology trend is moving the centralized cloud computing architecture towards the edge. The project will develop innovative research and development solutions to foster the uptake of the newest 5G technologies and services in two envisaged use cases and enable upscaling and exploitation of beyond state-of-the-art 5G technologies from theory to reality. The technologies addressed in this project have potential applications mainly to public transportation, maritime services, environment, but also possible to other domains like asset monitoring, energy (smart grid), smart city, smart agriculture, and healthcare services. As a joint effort to greet the dawn of the emerging massive Internet of things and beyond 5G ( era, we propose this collaborative research project which combines the expertise from five leading research and industrial organizations in Romania and Norway. The quality of the consortium is enriched by the participation of two third-county partners in Spain and Canada respectively.
Summary of project results
Along the path towards the next generation mobile communication systems, the ‘one architecture fits all’ concept used in 4G and the centralized cloud computing network architecture could not cope sufficiently with the diversity of future digital society applications. The beyond 5G technology with slicing capabilities (virtual parallel networks, each being dedicated to some specific class of applications, but working on the common physical infrastructure) could offer a more powerful and flexible networking support for massive Internet of Things (mIoT), mobile broadband services, mission critical services and other applications. This project has focused on mIoT, Internet of Vehicles/ Vehicle to everything (IoV/V2X) and maritime application scenarios and technology trends. The reason is that there was a knowledge gap between existing solutions and ever-growing service demands for emerging applications. The observation on the needs and technology challenges triggered our joint efforts to explore and develop novel solutions especially for mIoT based data collection and network slicing/edge computing.
Within this project, both network slicing, IoV/V2X and multi-access edge computing (MEC) technologies were applied to develop innovative solutions, together with beyond 5G radio access technologies for data collection.
The main goal of this project was to develop breakthrough beyond state-of-the-art solutions in orchestration, management, and control of resources, in the context of network slicing and edge computing based on mIoT enabled radio access network and core network for beyond 5G IoV/V2X and maritime applications. During the project, many collaborative research activities have been performed by the project teams and various theoretical and practical solutions have been proposed, on system architecture and covering both radio access networks and core networks. While the theoretical algorithms were validated via computer simulation, the practical solutions have been implemented in hardware-based testbeds. Extensive experiments were performed to assess their performance compared with existing solutions. The results were disseminated in high quality scientific publications, many of them being joint works.
One significant achievement was the implementation of three 5G network testbeds, two on UNSTPB campus and one on UiA campus. Many experiments on network connectivity, numerical performance, and service satisfaction have been performed based on these testbeds. Several experiments of network slice development and deployment using Open-Source MANO as an orchestrator and OpenStack as a virtual infrastructure manager have been performed. Also, a network automation platform was developed and integrated in the service chain, extending its functionality by automating the deployment of a network slice. Marine propagation experiments have been performed with the goal of better understanding and improving network connectivity on ships and areas close to ports.
The beneficiaries of this project are the project participants, especially early-stage researchers, the participating institutions, and the research communities in both Romania and Norway, designers and developers of 5G systems. The benefits include increased research capacity, higher scientific quality, and enhanced performance of Romanian research, as well as enhanced competence for developing cutting-edge solutions for industrial partner organizations.
Summary of bilateral results
The beneficiaries of this project are the project participants, especially early-stage researchers, the participating institutions, and the research communities in both Romania and Norway, designers and developers of 5G systems. The benefits include increased research capacity, higher scientific quality, and enhanced performance of Romanian research, as well as enhanced competence for developing cutting-edge solutions for industrial partner organizations