The focus of TRIANGLE is the development of a framework that facilitates the evaluation of the QoE of new mobile applications, services and devices designed to operate in the future 5G mobile broadband networks. The framework will exploit existing FIRE facilities adding new facilities when necessary. The project will identify reference deployment scenarios, will define new KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and QoE metrics, will develop new testing methodologies and tools, and will design a complete evaluation scheme. The project will focus on the development of a framework to ensure user QoE in the new challenging situations, especially those due to heterogeneous networks and considering the role software will have in the new 5G ecosystem The framework as value added will also provide the means to allow certification and quality mark for the applications, services and devices compliant to the requirements and test specifications developed in the project but also extensible to other FIRE test solutions. This will allow vendor differentiation, specially startups and SMEs, in the current globalized and competitive markets and further visibility of FIRE facilities. The framework, methods and tools developed during the project will focus on providing the mechanisms to incorporate new wireless technologies and topologies envisaged in 5G and contribute to the new ecosystem.

The path towards 6G is beginning now that 5G matured and is being deployed worldwide both publicly and privately. While 5G brought a step up in many fields, such as, performance and efficiency, more is always expected in terms of efficiency by the overall community and in terms of performance by industry and technology providers who want to further increase their offerings and products. Continuous demands for higher throughput, lower latency and more energy efficient communications needs to be supported by relevant use cases that can claim and demonstrate the needs for these requests. 6G-PATH goal is to help foster the further development and integration of new and improved tools and products from EU companies with 5G/6G, while also measuring relevant KPIs and KVIs. To achieve this, 7 testbeds will be part of the project consortium, which will be used by 10 use cases spread across four key verticals: Health, Education, Smart Cities and Farming. Moreover, a relevant portion of the budget will be used for FSTP, where we envision the integration of 2 new Pilot Sites, extend the testbeds with 10 additional technologies, as well as 30 new Use Cases, through Open Calls, to further involve the community and obtain more metrics and outcomes. 6G-PATH plans to work closely with other ongoing/starting Stream-B and Stream-C projects in a feedback loop, where the innovations that partners are achieving in other projects can be deployed and further tested by our pool of use cases and Open Calls, while sharing our results and outcomes to further cement the innovation being made.

The goal of the 5G Exchange (5GEx) project is to enable cross-domain orchestration of services over multiple administrations or over multi-domain single administrations. This will allow end-to-end network and service elements to mix in multi-vendor, heterogeneous technology and resource environments. Market fragmentation has resulted in a multitude of network operators each focused on different countries and regions. This makes it difficult to create infrastructure services spanning multiple countries, such as virtual connectivity or compute resources, as no single operator has a footprint everywhere. 5GEx aims to enable collaboration between operators, regarding 5G infrastructure services, with the view to introducing a unification via NFV/SDN compatible multi-domain orchestration by producing (i) an open platform enabling cross-domain orchestration of services over these multiple domains, with a set of open source software tools and extensions that can be utilised outside the scope of 5GEx; (ii) a Sandbox Network enabling experimentation and validation of the devised architecture, mechanisms, and business models; (iii) a proof-of-innovation multi-domain platform enabling multiple 5G use-cases and realistic scenarios that demonstrate the orchestration of complex end-to-end Infrastructure as a Service across multiple carriers; (iv) contributions to standards bodies of concepts learned during the development and experimentation of the project; (v) input to stimulate the telecom and IT industry stakeholders by actively promoting adoption of 5GEx’s open solutions. Such 5G infrastructure services will provide a crucial role in making 5G happen as they provide the foundation of all cloud and networking services. 5GEx aims to enable, through operator collaboration, a unified European infrastructure service market integrating multiple operators and technologies, where service provisioning is fast and automated and which results in stronger economy via economies of scale.