The vision of the 5Growth project is to empower verticals industries such as Industry 4.0, Transportation, and Energy with an AI-driven Automated and Sharable 5G End-to-End Solution that will allow these industries to achieve simultaneously their respective key performance targets. Towards this vision, 5Growth will automate the process for supporting diverse industry verticals through (i) a vertical portal in charge of interfacing verticals with the 5G End-to-End platforms, receiving their service requests and building the respective network slices on top, (ii) closed-loop automation and SLA control for vertical services lifecycle management and (iii) AI-driven end-to-end network solutions to jointly optimize Access, Transport, Core and Cloud, Edge and Fog resources, across multiple technologies and domains. The main objective of 5Growth is the technical and business validation of 5G technologies from the verticals’ points of view, following a field-trial-based approach on vertical sites (TRL 6-7). Multiple use cases of vertical industries (Comau, Efacec_S, Efacec_E, Innovalia) will be field-trialed on four vertical-owned sites in close collaboration with the vendors (Ericsson, Interdigital, NEC, Nokia) and the operators (Altice, Telecom Italia, Telefonica) in the project. 5Growth will leverage on the results of 5G-PPP Phase 2 projects where slicing, virtualization and multi-domain solutions for the creation and provisioning of vertical services are being developed and validated, e.g. 5G-TRANSFORMER and 5G-MONARCH. Two ICT-17-2018 5G End-to-End platforms, 5G EVE and 5G-VINNI, have been selected for the Trials to demonstrate the 5Growth specific vertical use cases. In addition to the impact on vertical-oriented standards (e.g., EN50126 (IEC62278) for railway signaling), the verticals in the consortium will be offered an opportunity to influence ongoing 5G standardization by leveraging the involvement of leading experts in the various relevant SDOs.

The vision of the 5G-TRANSFORMER project is that Mobile Transport Networks shall transform from today’s rigid interconnection solutions into an SDN/NFV-based 5G Mobile Transport and Computing Platform (MTP) able of simultaneously supporting an extremely diverse range of networking and computing requirements to meet in particular the specific needs of vertical industries. A new networking paradigm known as Network Slicing has emerged for 5G as the most promising approach to address this challenge by enabling per slice management of virtualized resources. 5G-TRANSFORMER aims to bring the “Network Slicing” paradigm into mobile transport networks by provisioning and managing MTP slices tailored to the needs of vertical industries. Specifically: automotive, healthcare and media. The technical approach is twofold: (1) Enable Vertical Industries to meet their service requirements within customised MTP slices; and (2) Aggregate and Federate transport networking and computing fabric, from the edge up to the core and cloud, to create and manage MTP slices throughout a federated virtualized infrastructure. The proposed solution defines three novel building blocks that will be developed and demonstrated integrating the aforementioned three vertical industries: (1) Vertical Slicer as the logical entry point (i.e., one stop shop) for verticals to support the creation of their respective transport slices in a short time-scale (in the order of minutes). (2) Service Orchestrator to orchestrate the federation of transport networking and computing resources from multiple domains and manage their allocation to slices. (3) Mobile Transport and Computing Platform as the underlying unified transport stratum for integrated fronthaul and backhaul networks. The 5G-TRANSFORMER project addresses “ICT 07–2017: 5G PPP Research and Validation of critical technologies and systems” with a special focus on the TA11: Converged 5G FlexHaul Network objectives of the pre-structuring model.