Overview
The evolution towards advanced 5G and future 6G networks presents both opportunities and challenges. Realising this vision requires extensive collaborative research to harness and standardise the best ideas. As digital technologies increasingly fuse physical and virtual realities, new services will emerge, characterised by ultra-high speeds, low latency, massive connectivity, and minimal energy use and extending to air, sea, and even space. However, the path forward brings key challenges, including the definition of new performance indicators, effective testing and validation of vertical applications within evolving infrastructures, and addressing emerging security concerns, all while ensuring openness, inclusivity, and innovation across stakeholders.
FIDAL aims to lead in the evolution of 5G by promoting open architectures, large-scale experimentation, and a multi-stakeholder approach. It targets human capability augmentation, enabling Media and Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) sectors to validate innovative applications, using Evolved 5G technologies, in real-world trial environments. These efforts will generate valuable feedback for industry, academia, and innovators ahead of broader commercial rollout across Europe. Building on 5G-PPP Phase 3, FIDAL will deliver a unified experimentation framework featuring Zero-Touch orchestration, reusable Network Applications, and wand secure AI-as-a-Service. The Evolved 5G technologies will be validated using three testbeds and three large-scale test infrastructures in Greece, Norway, and Spain.
Objectives
Extend, federate and evolve existing 5G testbeds to deliver an advanced future-proof evolved 5G facility, that is open and accessible to support 3rd party vertical experimentation for rapid prototyping and large-scale validation of advanced, forward-looking applications.
Leverage, develop, and extend innovative, next-generation, and business-relevant services, and applications (including digital twins and the internet of senses) in the Media and PPDR domains, showcasing the clear benefit of 5G evolution and preparing the ground for the introduction of 6G.
Implement a unified framework for automatically driving end-to-end network and service management decisions via a Zero-Touch engine, leveraging Distributed Deep Reinforcement learning-based control algorithms.
Deliver a repository of NetApps, AI-driven tools, open-source applications, open training sets, and data models to be leveraged by FIDAL vertical applications, 3rd party projects from Open Calls, and future SNS projects.
Implement an end-to-end Security Framework for the operations including AI as a Service (AIaaS).
Create impact through wide means of exploitation, contribution to standards, outreach and clustering activities, dissemination, communication and Open Calls.
eBOS Role in the Project
In FIDAL, eBOS will support the design and development of an AIaaS module oriented to support intelligent experimentation regarding vertical deployment on the network. eBOS will also contribute to the evaluation, deployment, and integration of the various testbeds and large-scale infrastructure components of the project during the large-scale trials and the Open Call trials.
eBOS will lead the Quality Assurance, Ethics and Risk Management of the project. It will also monitor the project’s progress to ensure that proactive measures are taken to mitigate risks, will establish and implement a set of Quality Assurance procedures to be followed by the Consortium and will make sure that all project outcomes and Deliverables are of high quality, submitted on time, and in alignment with the project scope.
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
