5G project holds first meeting

A kick-off meeting for partners in a Horizon 2020-funded project focusing on 5G communications is taking place in Dublin.

The ‘Building an Intelligent System of Insights and Action for 5G Network Management’, or CogNet, brings together partners from industry and academia, and focuses on developing a variety of technologies than can be used in large scale business deployments of 5G. The venture aims to realise adaptable solutions than can adjust centralised architectures to deliver solutions.

In comments carried by the European Commission, the project leaders say: “One of the key requirements of 5G will be to create a network that is highly optimised to make maximum use of available radio spectrum and bandwidth for quality of service. Because of the network size and the number of devices connected, it will be necessary for it to largely manage itself and deal with organisation, configuration, security and optimisation issues.

“Virtualisation will … play an important role as the network will need to provision itself dynamically to meet changing demands for resources and Network Function Virtualisation, the virtualising of network node functions and links, will be the key technology for this. We believe that Autonomic Network Management based on Machine Learning will be a key technology enabling an (almost) self-administering and self-managing network.”

The Research and Innovation Action project runs until 2018 and is receiving almost its entire €5.9m budget from the European Commission through Horizon 2020. The project is being co-ordinated by the Waterford Institute of Technology and includes the participation of IBM Ireland, Telefonica, Alcatel-Lucent Israel, the Technical University of Berlin and Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

The meeting in the Irish capital takes places over two days, ending on Thursday.