IMAGINE-B5G brings together four advanced 5G experimental facilities, located in Norway, Spain, Portugal, and France. These facilities will capitalise on the previous 5G-PPP infrastructure (ICT-17) and vertical trial projects (ICT-19) by drawing analogies and reusing the platform components as much as possible. Given that IMAGINE-B5G partners have collectively participated in all the previous ICT-17 and ICT-19 projects, this will ensure a successful implementation of SNS-D-01-01 goals and expected outcomes.
Collectively, the facilities will support a set of B5G applications (including immersive holographic, haptic and telepresence communications for enhanced human interaction) enabled by the integration of advanced 5G technologies, including 5G positioning, zero-touch solutions, network capability exposure, edge computing, advanced IoT solutions, network data analytics, millimeter wave (mmW) frequencies, advanced combinations of private and public networks, and open architectures. The infrastructure of the facilities in Norway, Spain and Portugal will be based on industry equipment and components. The French facility will bring a completely open-source E2E 5G implementation. The different facilities of IMAGINE-B5G will have diverse set of advanced 5G technologies. As such the project will implement facility federation with easy-to-use portal and APIs to enable vertical trials to seamlessly leverage resources regardless of the actual facility providing them. The architectures will ensure the accessibility and openness as well as forward compatibility of the facility infrastructure using an open framework through portal and open APIs to provide access across the multiple interworking facility sites.
The functionalities built into the IMAGINE-B5G platform will enable the project to identify, monitor and validate not only use case specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), but also KVIs (Key societal Value Indicators), at different levels (application, management/network and societal), demonstrating the value of the advanced 5G solutions and ultimately fostering the widespread adoption of these technologies. A special focus will be on providing security testing across all facilities to allow for discovery of vulnerabilities. This will be carried out by employing a common framework which will support the demonstration and evaluation of a range of advanced KPIs and KVIs.