Ericsson promotes a project aimed at unifying 5G infrastructures in Europe

Partners such as Telefónica and the Carlos III University of Madrid collaborate in the 5GEx project.

Ericsson will promote the 5G Exchange Project (5GEx) aimed at 5G research and innovation in Phase 1 as a Public Private Partnership (5GPPP) with the aim of achieving a unified European infrastructure service market that integrates multiple operators and technologies.

The project will focus on harmonizing services between different domains through multiple administrations or single multi-domain administrations. This harmonization will support NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and software-defined networking technologies. End-to-end network and service elements may be combined in multi-vendor, heterogeneous technology and resource environments.

For operators and content providers, this means automatic service provisioning with faster time to market. Services can be deployed on a scheduled basis thanks to the single center philosophy.

At the same time, enterprise users and vertical industries gain the flexibility to define, deploy and control service architectures on demand. Companies can achieve efficiencies by migrating network services such as firewalls and routers to a virtual platform and maintaining only physical networks.

The 5GEx project will run between October 2015 and March 2018, and Ericsson will drive the project in collaboration with a number of partners, including Spanish companies such as Telefónica and the Carlos III University of Madrid. Ericsson is already involved in a number of 5G research initiatives such as 5G for Europe and METIS II.

Sara Mazur, director of Ericsson Research, assures that "a unified 5G infrastructure services market will be a powerful driver for sophisticated services that have a positive impact on people, industry and society. As leaders in the development of 5G and partners in various collaborative initiatives in the industry, we are excited to lead the 5GEx project and contribute to realizing all the benefits of 5G."

The project envisions an open platform that allows harmonization of services in multiple domains, with a suite of open source software tools and extensions that can be used outside the scope of 5GEx.

It also aims to develop an experimental network that allows experimentation and validation of architectures, mechanisms and business models.

At the same time, it will launch a multi-domain innovation testing platform prepared for multiple 5G use cases and realistic scenarios, demonstrating the harmonization of complex, end-to-end Infrastructure as a Service across multiple operators.

The partners of the 5Gex program are Ericsson, Telefónica R&D, Carlos III University, Atos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Berlin Institute of Software Defined Networks, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Deutsche Telekom, European Center for Information and Communication Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Orange, RedZinc, Royal Institute of Technology, Telecom Italia, Telenor and University College London.