Natural and man-made disasters remind us how the ability of societies to adapt and prosper depends on the collective action of the whole society. But the significant role citizens and communities can play at the grassroots level has been overlooked in research. ENGAGE will turn this around, showing how individuals and local practices can interrelate effectively with planned preparedness and response, practitioners and technology. To achieve this bold goal ENGAGE will start with the knowledge, strategies, methods, tools and practices used by real world practitioners and citizens, and mature results from earlier projects. It will combine and extend these to create innovative solutions to disaster management and new ways of fostering trans-disciplinary collaboration and learning across disciplines. A model for assessing and methods for improving societal resilience will be complemented by an evolving knowledge platform providing actionable solutions meeting the diverse needs of authorities, first responders and citizens. ENGAGE will use empirical data on individual and collective contributions to societal resilience and take into account contextual aspects such as socio-economic conditions, digital literacy, culture, gender, social capital, trust and diversity. It will focus on aspects that can be directly enhanced such as risk awareness, communication, social media, citizens’ as well as authorities’ and first responders’ involvement. Real world field validations will be used to demonstrate and validate ENGAGE solutions and their transferability to diverse contexts across Europe. The consortium is complemented by a Knowledge and Innovation Community of Practice that already has 37 members and will grow during the project. This team includes representatives from authorities, first responders, citizens associations, NGO´s, SMEs, industries, schools and academia. Together, they will propose validated solutions contributing to specific SENDAI actions.

FUDGE-5G aims to create a new generation of world leading 5G core network technology companies for private 5G networks based in Europe. FUDGE-5G will make a leap forward in realizing the notion of cloud-native 5G private networks by developing a further enhanced Service-Based Architecture (eSBA) for both control plane and user plane with “decomposed” players of the ecosystem divided into: New Radio (NR) access network infrastructure provider, eSBA platform provider, mobile 5G Core (5GC) provider, vertical application orchestration provider and vertical service provider. The forward-looking FUDGE-5G architecture will also feature “all-Ethernet” 5GLAN (Local Area Network), 5G-TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking), 5G-Multicast and intelligent vertical application orchestration features. The proposed framework enables highly customized cloud-native deployment of private 5G networks. FUDGE-5G will accelerate the (inevitable) shift to a fully software-based 5G core network by offering a disintegrated environment where components, both in control and user plane, can be deployed anywhere as micro-services (i.e., edge, on premises and cloud), being agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. This softwarization exposing 5G NR HW to third parties will enable the usage of off-the-shelf commodity HW to deliver additional cost savings, faster deployments and ultimately greater adoption for private networks. The consortium has been carefully built around several innovative high-tech small and medium European vendors for virtualized 5GC and service orchestration solutions and applications. They will be able to integrate, test and validate their 5G technical solutions over the premium end-to-end 5G NR facility provided by a major European MNO in several innovative use cases for private networks under real-life operational conditions with prominent vertical stakeholders. State-of-the-art eSBA capabilities will be offered by large vendors.

5G-Xcast will devise, assess and demonstrate large scale immersive media delivery by means of conceptually novel wireless technologies, contributing to the further definition of 5G and its standardisation. 5G-Xcast will focus on large scale media distribution, as this use case is one of the most demanding requirements in terms of data rate (capacity), scalability (cost-effectiveness) and ubiquity (coverage). The 5G-Xcast media delivery solution will have built-in unicast/multicast/broadcast modes and caching capabilities. The project will take a holistic approach in order to harmonize media delivery across the three communication modes being considered, and to provide a seamless user experience, as well as common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to content service providers. The project will cover multiple disciplines from the radio interface to the transport and application layers, including protocols and APIs, as well as network and system architecture aspects. The development of the 5G-Xcast media delivery solution will be focused on the Media and Entertainment (M&E) vertical. The automotive, Internet of Things and public safety verticals will be considered to ensure that their respective technical requirements are also identified and suitably addressed. Proof-of-concept prototypes and technology demonstrators are pivotal tasks of the project. Special emphasis will be given to emerging new immersive media services that cannot be efficiently delivered by existing technologies and networks. 5G-Xcast will enable progressive convergence in the media delivery sector while optimising the resources of the available infrastructures, enabling new business models over fixed, mobile and broadcast networks that will be also investigated in the project. The consortium is a balanced combination of telecom and media entities, covering the complete M&E value chain, with a very strong presence in 5G-PPP phase-1 and 3GPP standardization of 4G Broadcast.