It is our pleasure to announce that the 5G-EPICENTRE Project and the consortium partners will participate in the Symposium on Public Protection and Disaster Relief/Emergency and Crisis Management at the upcoming IEEE Future Networks World Forum. 

Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) has come into increased attention due to recent disasters (fires, floods, heat waves, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions), as well major events (World Cup, World Youth Day and now the Euro 2024 and the Olympic Games). The need to provide increased situation awareness and decision-making, supporting C&C and then empowering first responders, requires improved, flexible, integrated connectivity to the field. 5G was recognised, already in the EU2016 5G Action Plan as a means to extend existing capabilities, enabling broadband connectivity to security forces and first responders.

The Symposium will be held in Dubai, UAE, from the 15th to 17th of October 2024.  The purpose of the symposium and the conference is to bring together all relevant 5G-PPP and 6G-SNS projects with a call for papers open. The accepted papers of the symposium will be included in IEEE Xplore. 

In addition, this Symposium will provide an opportunity to highlight recent contributions to 5G for PPDR as well as eHealth, and discuss how best to integrate such capabilities with existing (PMR, TETRA/Tetrapol) solutions, with a view towards deployment.  Finally, the next step towards a common European Critical Communication System will also be discussed. 

5G-EPICENTRE along with other 5G-PPP projects will participate actively with their research and real-life application demos, focusing on real-life solutions, deployment & testing and validation in the real-world, and concrete use cases. 

One of the core 5G-EPICENTRE ambitions is to setup a sufficiently open platform to enable SMEs and developers to build, rollout and run distributed edge- and 5G-enabled services and applications. The 5G-EPICENTRE platform is actually an enabler of cloud-native 5G implementations, as well as a useful tool for gaining insights and solutions scaling, aimed to support the vibrant ecosystem of community groups and contribute knowledge and resources toward higher quality services in the PPDR domain. Toward this end, 5G-EPICENTRE releases a set of repositories of the core components of the 5G-EPICENTRE platform, utilized to automatically rebuild the application environment whenever a service configuration rollout takes place. 

Please find below the releases of the open-source components part of the 5G-EPICENTRE platform mechanisms/components:

Nemergent Solutions

Experimentation monitoring & troubleshooting dashboard

ONESource

Network Traffic Collector: Mechanism used to collect the network traffic

Injection Mechanism: Mechanism used to deploy the HSPF sidecars next to already executing Network Applications

Reporting Interface: Mechanism used to report the HSPF messages (anomalies detected and KPIs)

5G-EPICENTRE actively supported and participated in the EUCNC Global Summit 2024

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In the context of the EUCNC, UMA presented one of the most significant advancements in 5G is the concept of network slice, which allows creating multiple virtual networks on a single physical infrastructure. In the context of mission-critical communications, the usage of end-to-end slices would enable the use of a public 5G network to provide robust, secure, and highly reliable communication systems during Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) communications. 

The paper empirically demonstrates the 5G network slices, illustrating their efficacy in supporting differentiated service requirements. More specifically, the paper presented explored the architectural setup, the implementation of slice-specific performance attributes, and the potential impacts on emergency response operations. Our findings aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse on applying 5G technologies for critical communication scenarios, providing insights into the practical challenges and solutions associated with deploying network slices for PPDR purposes.

The trials performed showed that slicing can ensure the availability of network resources in congestion scenarios, which is critical for communication in emergency situations.

The 2024 EuCNC & 6G Summit unites two prestigious telecommunications conferences: EuCNC, backed by the European Commission, and the 6G Summit from Finland’s 6G Flagship programme. Sponsored by IEEE ComSoc, EURASIP, and EurAAP, this event encompasses all facets of telecommunications, from 5G deployment and mobile IoT to 6G research and future communication systems, including experimentation, testbeds, applications, and services.

This conference attracts over 900 delegates from more than 40 countries, featuring cutting-edge research and showcasing the latest results and technologies. With more than 50 exhibitors, it demonstrates advancements within EU R&I programmes. As a not-for-profit organization, the conference ensures registration fees are kept low, with any surplus allocated to grants.

Best Paper and Booth Awards will be presented, and accepted papers for regular sessions will be published in the Conference Proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore and other A&I databases.

From June 3rd to 6th, 2024, in Antwerp, Belgium, the 5G-EPICENTRE Project proudly participated in Booth #54. Our showcase featured live demos, a testbed federation with Karmada, and immersive displays of our latest advancements through posters and videos.

On Monday, April 22nd, the 5G-EPICENTRE project Plenary Meeting took place online. The project coordinator, ADS, hosted the one-day meeting in a virtual environment. 

The plenary meeting offered a great opportunity for the Consortium to meet and synchronize their upcoming activities toward the project’s finalization in June 2024, as well as set the planning for the next two months. 

The meeting was opened by the coordinator, who set the agenda and posed the main management milestones of the project. All technical WPs provided a brief overview of the action undertaken presented by the Work Package leaders with the active participation of all partners. The partners set the roadmap and activities that will take place for the promotion of the eight (8) Use Cases and their compilation, finalization and evaluation of the experimentation program of 5G-EPICENTRE. 

Special emphasis was be given to the Dissemination and Communication activities for the promotion of the scientific, technical, and deployment results of the project. The upcoming EuCNC (European Conference on Networks and Communications) & 6G Summit, where the 5G-EPICENTRE will be actively present, is a major milestone. This event will provide an exciting opportunity to showcase the latest demos and results to the participants, focusing on the main stakeholders, PPDR communities, 5G service providers and SMEs.

On the 9th of April, the EC IAFA Event #4-2 on the Interim Steps: 6G Standardisation Requirements. The online workshop series are organized by SNS OPS as part of its Impact Assessment and Facilitation Action (IAFA) initiative in collaboration with ETSI and HSbooster.eu. The purpose of the series is to tackle relevant topics linked to challenges in standardisation in the context of 5G/6G developments, covering topics such as SDOs’ future 6G Agendas, SDOs 6G Work Items, verticals and standardisation, including the advancements and support of services enabled by 5G and 6G.

During the 2nd event of the IAFA series the participants provided their experience and insights on the emerging 6G standardisation requirements and work items in the attempt to harmonise efforts between R&I projects and SDOs, with specific input on European SDOs. The presenters gave emphasis on the importance of collaborative and coordinated efforts in R&D for 6G so that the project results can contribute to the creation of standards and form the future landscape of standardisation, addressing emerging challenges such as integration between NTN and non-NTN, network automation efforts and challenges for security.

Find out more here.

5G-EPICENTRE actively supported and participated in the 5G Innovations for Verticals Workshop, organized by the 5GASP Project. The event was held in Athens, Greece, on March 14th. 

The 5G Innovations for Verticals Workshop, the final public event of 5GASP, was a collaborative effort that saw participation not only from 5GASP partners but also from partners of other ICT-41 projects such as 5G-EPICENTRE, 5G-IANA, Smart5Grid, and special external guests from Greece. The workshop provided a platform for all ICT-41 projects to approach the achievements of the 5GASP project and other ICT-41 projects. Each project showcased its technological progress, assessed the results, and discussed the main challenges related to the integration and deployment of novel solutions of 5GASP to the community through standardization of software components and Open-Source Software contributions.

More specifically, NOVA, as a partner of the 5G-EPICENTRE, was also present at the event to present the 5G-EPICENTRE project, the innovative Use Cases implemented and deployed, as well as the results from the ICT-41 Plugtests performed in Aveiro in the past November. Special emphasis was given to deploying the FIDEGAD/5G-EPICENTRE demo included in the ICT-41 Plugfest, co-organized by 5GASP and 5G-EPICENTRE projects. The demo results were presented, along with the deployment challenges and lessons learned. In this workshop, 5GASP partners and other ICT-41 projects (5G-IANA, 5G-EPICENTRE, Smart5Grid) approached the achievements of the ICT-41 projects accordingly, to show and highlight the technological progress made by the projects, assess and discuss the integration of projects and the novel solutions of 5GASP to the community through standardization of software components and Open Source Software contributions.

The 5G-EPICENTRE Experimentation Program is actively involved in the engagement of the European PPDR Community for conducting experiments with PPDR users for testing and validating their solutions. In the context of the 5G-EPICENTRE experimentation program, for conducting 3rd party experiments the project partners OPTO and Fraunhofer HHI handled a meeting with the Saxon Police Force at the State Police Headquarters Görlitz for their participation.

The experiment will be based on the UC3 AND UC6 of 5G-EPICENTRE.

The collaboration of OPTO and HHI is focused on integrating 5G solutions and services into the experimenter’s infrastructure. More specifically, the 5G network slice will be used to secure ultra-reliability and will be streaming Infrared (IR) and optical video streams of the site for an in-depth analysis of specific emergencies and crisis management.

The integration and testing focus on image data transfer over networks and processing the image data using Artificial Intelligence (AI), customized for the needs of PPDR-users, transferring data via a Virtual Network Function (VNF) AI Analyzer to a 5G connected handheld display device. To this end, 5G-EPICENTRE prepares a demo creation to showcase the overall solution.

Stay tuned for the upcoming developments and results from the demonstrations of the 5G-EPICENTRE in real-life PPDR services and their implications. Contact the 5G-EPICENTRE team to run your own experiment by filling in the form provided. Apply here!