Long-term towards Evolved 5G and 6G research needs mobilization of massive volumes of ideas, from which the best can emerge and be taken into standardization. It is the convergence of the cyber and physical worlds that could be achieved with the very low latency and high data capacity of Beyond 5G and 6G networks and thus the creation of services such as digital twins and internet of senses/haptic applications. This future eco-system is on course to be more collaborative and inclusive than previous generations of network, and FIDAL aims to lead the way by promoting open architectures, large experimentation sites and taking a multi-stakeholder approach. FIDAL steps in, targeting the augmentation of human capabilities, allowing Media & PPDR vertical industry players to perform advanced technological and business validation in large-scale field trials of highly innovative and advanced applications, that exploit Evolved 5G technologies. This, in turn, will provide extensive and valuable feedback to the broader industry, academia, innovators and community before wide commercial deployments of Evolved 5G networks throughout Europe. FIDAL key objective is to extend and deliver (i) advanced future proof Evolved 5G test infrastructures, anticipating evolution into next SNS phase, (ii) open & accessible to support 3rd party vertical experiments, (iii) test environments for rapid prototyping and large-scale validation of advanced, forward-looking applications. The project will build on the success of 5G-PPP Phase 3 projects, producing a unified experimentation framework with Zero-Touch orchestration, reusable Network Applications and secure AI as a Service capabilities. FIDAL will deploy 3 testbeds and 3 large-scale test infrastructures in Greece, Norway and Spain aiming to validate Evolved 5G technologies in a user context to maximise downstream take up, thus cultivating the ground for 6G.

The 6G-SANDBOX project brings a complete and modular facility for the European experimentation ecosystem (in line and under the directions set by SNS JU), which is expected to support for the next decade technology and research validation processes needed in the pathway towards 6G. The target is at technologies and research advances, that span over the entire service provisioning chain, and refer to user/data, control and management planes. In this direction, 6G-SANDBOX introduces the concept of Trial Networks, which refers to fully configurable, manageable and controlled end-to-end networks, composed of both digital and physical nodes. The 6G-SANDBOX Trial Networks incorporate infrastructures distributed in EU (namely in Malaga, Athens, Berlin and Oulu) and offer to third parties (including experimenters from open calls) automated experimentation capabilities through a rich and extensible toolbox. Meant to create tangible and long-term impact, the 6G KPIs and KVIs that will be quantified with the facility, will be released to any interested party; while the set of developments and APIs that will be produced, will feed an open repository as an initial step to move the contributions and the lessons learned beyond the project boarders and define a European 6G library.