European 5G-VICTORI Project kick-off in Berlin
Large scale trials for Railway, Energy, Media and Factories of the Future planned
5G-VICTORI is funded by the EU program Horizon 2020 with around 13.5 Mio EUR. It runs over a period of three years and started on 1st of June, 2019.
The 5G-VICTORI consortium came together last week for the project’s kick-off meeting in Berlin. 5G-VICTORI, coordinated by IHP – Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics, comprises twenty-five partners from eight European countries, and the goal of the meeting was to trigger the discussions related to the definition of the use cases, the associated requirements, and to sketch the proposed field trials.
5G mobile networks are taking shape and will soon be available to everyone. In 2020, the commercial roll out of this new technology will start. It will enable high-speed connectivity from everywhere, connecting large numbers of small sensors, controlling production lines in large factories, support autonomous driving and allow E-health applications, to name just a few.
Digital technologies have been identified by the EU as key in addressing some of its fundamental challenges associated with societal and economic objectives, such as improved quality of living for citizens, sustainable development and economic growth. The development of 5G solutions for industrial applications in Europe requires the execution of 5G trials, able to fulfill the needs of specific sectors. Some of the sectors, also known as “vertical” to the ICT industry, will significantly benefited by the use of 5G technologies.
The 5G-VICTORI project addresses some of these sectors and establishes future proof infrastructures that are capable to accommodate the execution of concurrent industrial use cases. The main sectors targeted in such trials include Transportation, Energy, Media, and Factories of the Future. The project partners include industrial companies, research institutes and universities from eight European countries.
The project coordinators gave an introduction of the project, stressing the technical challenges and the ambitious large scale trials for technology- and use case verification. “With respect to 4G, many parameters must be improved for future 5G networks in order to meet the demand for broadband communication, ultra reliable communications and large sensor networks. The planned field trials will verify the efficiency of the technologies developed in earlier research projects. The 5G-VICTORI partners must throughly verify to which extend the demands of potential customers can be met,” says Dr. Jesús Gutiérrez, the 5G-VICTORI project coordinator.
Prof. Grass, second coordinator of the project and leader of the Wireless Broadband Communications Group at IHP explains, “5G-VICTORI brings together many partners who already have extensive expertise in developing and deploying 5G-technology. Together with potential users we are able to implement realistic use-cases and scenarios for testing this technology. Our field trials in Berlin (GER), at several sites in France (FR), Romania (RO), Patras (GR) and Bristol (GB) will generate valuable data for optimising the technology and to run exciting services on this powerful new network infrastructure.”
5G-VICTORI is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP), the joint initiative of the European information and communications industry. The goal of this organization is to specify the requirements for the next generation of communications networks and services. At this stage of 5G development, the 5G-PPP Projects are expected to execute large field trials for testing and verifying the performance of 5G technologies in operational environments.
