VITAL-5G Project

The strategic objective of VITAL-5G is to create an open, virtualized and flexible experimentation facility comprised of an intelligent virtual platform, three distributed European 5G-testbeds and associated vertical infrastructure, to enable the testing and validation of Transport & Logistics (T&L) Network Applications (NetApps) in real-life conditions, utilizing 5G connectivity. In order to allow for the project to be focused on the development, management and sharing of innovative T&L NetApps, VITAL-5G plans to proactively cooperate and reuse the outputs of ongoing 5G PPP projects to a significant degree (e.g. ICT-17, ICT-19, ICT-53 projects) for the platform development (i.e. onboarding VNFs, orchestration functionalities, GUIs, dashboards, etc.) and for the 5G-testbeds (ICT-17 & ICT-53 testbeds to be reused and extended for the purposes of VITAL-5G). The smooth onboarding of technology and collaboration across these projects is ensured by the proactive participation, as project partners, of multiple key stakeholders of ICT-17 (e.g. 5G-EVE), ICT-19 (e.g. 5G-SOLUTIONS, 5G-HEART) and ICT-53 (5G-Blueprint) in the VITAL-5G consortium. VITAL-5G’s vision for NetApps will allow for the development of a strong sectoral T&L ecosystem of vertical stakeholders (internal and external), which will be facilitated via the collaborative open tools and open repository delivered by the project. In such an open format collaboration, multiple NetApps will be developed, reused, enhanced and validated owed to the complementary facilities offered by VITAL-5G infrastructure, while the 3rd party experimentation concepts will allow for external SMEs to reuse the VITAL-5G NetApps (developed within the project) to try out new approaches and solutions with a view to driving new SME revenues. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 101016567.