Leverage effect of EU research and innovation funding in terms of private investment in R&D for 5G systems in the order of 5 to 10 times

The industrial partners of the 5G ESSENCE consortium, including both big companies and SMEs, have already identified exploitation plans for making use of the 5G ESSENCE results in their businesses. The use cases of 5G ESSENCE will serve as real-world tests to gauge the applicability of the designed solutions, providing valuable feedback on the viability of approaches and potential necessary adaptations for bringing them to the market. This will definitely contribute to increasing the levels of private investment for 5G systems at European level. Specific areas in which further investment by companies is envisaged include the delivery of pioneering services by operators, the hypervisor optimisation in cloud deployments, the low-overhead virtualisation solutions for constrained devices in the embedded cloud at the network edge or the inclusion of the small cell management features developed in 5G ESSENCE in the mainline product roadmaps.

Target SME participation under the 5G-PPP initiative commensurate with an allocation of 20% of the total public funding

The 5G ESSENCE consortium includes seven SMEs (SISTEL, ISW, ATH, SML, ORION, 8BELLS, CPT), representing the 28.7% of the total PM resource allocation of the project and 26.7% of the total budget. They contribute to the technical roadmap and objectives in 5G ESSENCE and will be involved in the key technological component development and innovation aspects in the project from an early stage (e.g., the cSD-RAN controller, the demonstrations in the 5G Edge Acceleration in a Stadium use case, etc.). The SMEs are well positioned to leverage the technological expertise within the 5G market space either through the consortium or as individual entities. Furthermore, the depth of the industrial participation allows the SMEs to work closely with the large players to gain valuable expertise, and further, the contribution to open standards and open source communities provide the opportunity for better exploitation plans and commercialisation potential.

Performance KPI

5G ESSENCE Contributions

Very dense deployments to connect over 7 trillion wireless devices serving over 7 billion people;

The provision of wireless services in dense deployments is one of the main targets of the 5G ESSENCE concept. The capability of offering a multitenant network is key in such scenarios so as to avoid multiple separate deployments on a per operator basis. Besides, the two-tier architecture will be specially suited for highly dense scenarios, since it will allow centralising the control plane functions, so that a more efficient coordination between CESCs will be achieved (e.g., in order to mitigate interference between CESCs). This capability of 5G ESSENCE will be demonstrated in two of the use cases, namely the 5G edge acceleration in a stadium and the inflight connectivity and entertainment systems, both of them characterised by a high density of users connected to the infrastructure.

Secure, reliable and dependable Internet with a “zero perceived” downtime for services provision.

The two-tier 5G ESSENCE architecture inherently targets the provision of MEC services running at the Edge DC. They will be hosted either in the distributed Light DC running at the CESC, or in the centralised Main DC, both of them located at the edge of the network. The architecture will be designed to be flexible so that the best locations for the VNFs composing the offered services can be selected depending on the use case, thanks to the use of advanced telemetry and analytics tools. All these elements will facilitate the provisioning of services with “zero perceived” downtime (e.g., by allowing local production of multimedia content in a stadium, by exploiting content caching, etc.).

Societal KPI

5G ESSENCE Contributions

Enabling advanced user controlled privacy

5G ESSENCE solution will provide a flexible architecture facilitating that it can be securely shared by different tenants and vertical industries through E2E network slicing mechanisms that will ensure the desired levels of isolation and privacy between the different users. This will be particularly demonstrated in the use case on 5G E2E slicing for mission critical applications, which will enable the coexistence of users with very different requirements, and under strict privacy constraints.

Reduction of energy consumption per service up to 90% (as compared to 2010)

By allowing CAPEX/OPEX cost reduction through multi-tenancy/multi-service capabilities instilled through CESC infrastructure sharing, 5G ESSENCE actually provides a key societal contribution towards the reduction of CO₂ from the ICT industry, in line with the objectives of many EU member states. Further, by leveraging the MEC capabilities, the CESC management functionalities will leverage the VNFs to deploy mobile core network functionalities closer to the edges thus reducing the overhead on signalling which will be translated into energy savings. Further, the use of dynamic telemetry and analytics tools will facilitate an efficient management of the CESC networks, enabling the implementation of smart techniques for energy saving (e.g., by switching some of the CESCs when there is no traffic, etc.)

European availability of a competitive industrial offer for 5G systems and technologies

CESC MEC capabilities, inherent to the multi-tenant 5G ESSENCE architecture, will provide a new ecosystem and value chain for new applications and service delivery at lower costs due to the higher efficiency in resource usage, achieved also thanks to a smart management relying on advanced analytics tools. Software and application providers can serve the new ecosystem by developing and bringing to the market innovative and ground-breaking services and applications.

New economically-viable services of high societal value like U-HDTV and M2M applications

5G ESSENCE will greatly improve the capabilities of CSPs and service providers to add new revenue streams for innovative services that have higher societal value and better QoE delivered from closer to the user. Placing relevant applications closer to the edge and slicing the infrastructure to offer multi-tenancy capabilities will allow the users to be offered with economically-viable applications, leveraging on the OPEX gains and other service compositions. Such new services and applications are particularly relevant for the use cases of 5G ESSENCE dealing with content provision in the stadium and with the inflight connectivity and entertainment systems, where it can be expected that broadcast services (e.g., U-HDTV) could be included.

Establishment and availability of 5G skills development curricula in partnership with EIT

5G ESSENCE partners are contributors to the EIT. This will allow the project to create knowledge transfer plans leveraging the EIT framework to develop both education and business related promotion of the 5G ESSENCE concepts, and further to showcase 5G ESSENCE prototypes and demonstrations in cooperation with the EIT to potential customers and stakeholders. Besides, the academic partners of 5G ESSENCE intend also to introduce the project concepts in the curricula of teaching programs for the next courses at graduate, master and doctoral levels, thus contributing to increasing the knowledge and skills about 5G.