Large-scale pilots for supply end-to-end infrastructures integrating device, network computing and communication capabilities for Telco Edge Cloud deployments, as a basis for Connected Collaborative Computing Networks (3C networks) (RIA) -

Project results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:

• Strengthen European industrial ecosystems for the 3C Network, while enabling the path towards sustainability and competitiveness of key vertical sectors in the EU, to be supported in the work programme 2026-2027 of Horizon Europe by future large-scale pilot focusing on 3Cs demand in vertical industrial sectors such as “industrial virtual worlds” (automotive, aerospace, processing, manufacturing, agriculture, electronics), services (mobility, energy, smart communities, health) or others.
• Strategic industrial cooperation among network and data processing stakeholders which enable new revenue streams in support of viable communication infrastructures by building open platforms, underpinning an emerging industrial open telco edge cloud ecosystem to be established in Europe.
• The pilot should devise appropriate cooperation mechanisms with the Open Internet Stack actions, to help defining the requirements for the development of the building blocks and ensure their integration in the pilot, including envisaging mechanisms for testing and integration of the solutions developed by the Open Internet Stack.
• A European vision of advanced digital infrastructures through the convergence of connectivity with interoperable edge and cloud computing services. Moreover, the large-scale pilot should seek and include sufficient evidence of a clear commitment from the major European telecom, cloud and edge providers to industrialise further the results of the pilot among the major stakeholders, in particular by considering the necessary business adaptations and future perspectives, etc. In this context, an advisory group of end users should be set up to discuss and advise about user requirements to be considered in relation to the pilots. This group will collect requirements from a large range of users and test them through small demonstrations.

The recent Commission White Paper “How to master Europe’s digital infrastructure needs?” highlights the convergence of electronic communications networks and cloud services, and call for the strengthening of the EU “Telco Edge Cloud” infrastructure, by creating the 3C Network (Connected Collaborative Computing).

The convergence of connectivity, including mobile networks (5G and 5G advanced), combined with computing environments at the edge and cloud is a unique opportunity for the European telecom industry to drive a European vision of next generation digital infrastructures and meet future processing demands of IoT and AI. Investing into future computing and connectivity paradigms will strengthen the industrial European supply side and deliver an enablement for the path towards sustainability of key sectors in the demand side.

Increased density of edge and cloud facilities is needed to sustain adoption of innovative and sovereign telco edge cloud technologies across Europe. Backed by ubiquitous connectivity to deliver the right performance in terms of bandwidth and latency, Europe’s infrastructure will require advanced network management and orchestration technology as well as neutral interconnection services to guarantee efficient infrastructure utilisation and enable innovative use cases at scale.

The 3C Network large-scale pilot (focusing on the supply side) aims at setting up end-to-end integrated infrastructures and platforms, bringing together players from different segments of the connectivity and compute value chain and beyond. The main target is to research and validate the integration of device, network, cloud and edge computing, and communication capabilities for telco edge cloud deployments to realize a ubiquitous mesh of computing and communication resources. This will complement the Telco Edge Cloud reference deployments of Digital Europe and IPCEI-CIS and will feed into future deployment initiatives.

Therefore, the scope for the action would be the following:

• Researching and prototyping at scale end-to-end telco edge cloud integrated infrastructures and platforms, bringing together players from different segments of the connectivity value chain and beyond, such as operators, system integrators, network/cloud/edge suppliers, experts on AI and (wireless) communication, experts on testing and validation of network technologies and services, IoT platform providers et al.
• Developing open orchestration platforms across the telco edge cloud continuum, to support unlocking the transformative value of AI for European businesses and driving business growth in multiple industries strategic for Europe and associated countries.
• Integrating AI solutions for optimising the orchestration of the different resources to be managed by the pilot actions, such as bandwidth, spectrum, computing, hardware, other user requirements.
• Investigation, testing, validation and demonstration of solutions and prototypes of the simultaneous use of integrated devices, edge and cloud computing and communication resources in operational environments (including both public networks and large private networks), ensuring high level of security and privacy, energy efficiency, transparency and control of the ecological footprint.
• Investigation, testing, validation and demonstration of integration of available infrastructures as cloud-edge continuum with distributed systems such as blockchain infrastructure and services, data spaces and seamless and comprehensive AI systems in the process of creation of decentralised digital infrastructure network, including the compliance with applicable EU regulations.
• Exploration of novel approaches for cybersecurity by design and sustainability in advanced communication infrastructure.

With radical changes triggered by GenAI, as well as AI applications penetrating more and more industrial domains, demands for low latency are looming. The pilot should have to tackle the network evolution complementing the cloud with progress towards the edge, as well as needing reliability from the mobile networks.

Key aspects to be researched, validated and demonstrated by the 3C Network end-to-end infrastructures include:

• AI-enabled orchestration and quality assurance tools, algorithms and techniques which cater for hybrid multi-cloud technologies.
• Enablers for multi-level (networks, edge, cloud, and services) federation management and interoperability.
• Tools and mechanisms that facilitate the standardised exposure of network functions.
• Enablement of Edge-as-a-Service approaches that effectively integrate cloud computing's multi-tenancy and resource sharing concepts into access networks.
• Security and Compliance mechanisms targeted for telco edge cloud.
• Tools for guaranteed end-to-end QoS and QoE across heterogeneous network, cloud and edge infrastructures.
• Mechanisms to exploit specialised hardware and accelerators to address the strict the requirements (e.g. latency, energy efficiency) of virtualised network functions.
• Investigation on the trade-offs associated to Edge nodes density and placement required in telco edge cloud deployments to achieve the target latency rates.
• Lightweight virtualisation and cloud-native approaches for virtualised network functions.
• Novel approaches to handle user mobility to ensure edge service continuity and quality of service.
• Privacy preserving record linkage on individual citizen level and device-related level to foster meaningful linkage of data for secondary usage.

Thanks to these, the pilot and its associated research should support the emergence of telco edge cloud as-a-service approaches that successfully implement multi-tenancy and resource sharing notions from cloud computing into network infrastructure and resources. In addition, the project infrastructures should cater for the pragmatic complexities associated with the physical placement of the various types of telco edge cloud platforms (near, far, regional,) across the territory considering the necessary trade-offs between performance, capacity, and costs.

Furthermore, the pilot should tackle the need for multi-cloud and edge service orchestration at scale, which enables workload portability across providers and technologies as well as effective service placement and lightweight and cloud-native forms for NFV and optimisation by means of acceleration, multi-cloud orchestration, multi-level federation and mobility management.

Moreover, the technical solutions in the pilot should investigate the use of AI to handle the optimal allocation and optimisation of the operation of the digital infrastructures resultant of the combination of distributed compute and network resources of the edge cloud compute continuum in a predictive and efficient manner and at scale. These should take into consideration the appropriate QoS trade-offs in relation to bandwidth, spectrum, computing, hardware and other functional and non-functional requirements, cater for the need for AI/ML to improve optimisation of assets and process and closed-loop automation, and target development and life-cycle management of AI models and resource management tools for the optimal management of combined and converged network, cloud and edge infrastructures. It will integrate security and privacy by design into account and seek to incorporate mechanisms such as edge discovery and deployment as-a-service delivery, end-to-end network and compute performance, energy efficiency and mobility management, including the Non-Terrestrial Network component for ubiquity.

The pilot should provide an open, multi-supplier, multi-vendor, and interoperable Telco Edge Cloud reference architecture and ecosystem that encourages cooperation and cooperative development among all key stakeholders, with broad representation of MS/AC, owing to the joint research to be implemented. Furthermore, the pilot should define open access policies and mechanisms that aim to maximise the impact of the provided infrastructure which take into consideration the long-term sustainability and addressing different uses by industrial and research communities. When necessary, these should explore collaboration with complementary actions addressing the demand side.

Project participants should analyse the existing standards landscape as a key state-of-the-art input when planning their project activities, and relevant open-source projects (e.g., Sylva, ANUJET, Nephio, CAMARA). The development paths of the critical technologies are expected to be merged and aligned to support the standardisation and uptake of 6G and Web 4.0.

The pilot should help maturing the technologies resulting from medium TRLs projects, while performing its own research towards enabling and prototyping of converged telco cloud edge platforms in operational and multi-suppliers, multi-domain and multi-tenant environments.

The pilot should cover research on infrastructure and platforms mid-TRLs telco edge cloud technologies, including development of telco-cloud network resources orchestration, demos, proof of concepts and early deployment of technologies.

The main achievements of the pilot should be showcased by means of small-scale demonstrations, that could be scaled up in future work programmes, for instance demonstrators on virtual worlds for industrial settings.

The pilot should ensure a high degree of participation of stakeholders from the relevant technological sectors, including SMEs, scaleups and start-ups, as well as properly consider the demand side from vertical sectors and broad representation of MS/AC, also in view of the planned demand-side large-scale pilots. In this regard, proposals should clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the participating stakeholders in developing, testing, validating, updating, maintaining and/ or using the technologies and services of the 3Cs network. The pilot’s Consortium should also define a policy on the ownership and access of 3Cs network resources and facilities, during the Horizon Europe project and beyond.

Proposals are expected to build synergies and ensure complementarities with relevant topics under SNS JU Work Programme 2022-2024, Digital Europe Programme WP2023-2024, IPCEI-CIS, Connecting Europe Facility.

The large-scale pilot would ideally reuse and extend relevant open-source frameworks and capitalise on existing testing and trial platforms from European or national initiatives [1] among which the IPCEI-CIS, SNS Stream C (dedicated to the development of EU-wide experimentation platforms incorporating promising 6G enablers), SNS Stream D projects (which focuses on implementing large-scale trials and targets specific verticals of high economic and societal importance), and other SNS projects, results from Open Internet Stack action, the Cloud-Edge-IoT HE projects, and the Digital Europe Programme’s Reference edge-cloud deployments, the “Empowering AI across the continuum” and the “Software engineering for AI” R&I areas, as well as research results on infrastructure and platforms. It should also establish strong relationship and collaboration with complementary EU-funded research activities, and also ensure close interaction with the relevant constituencies driving that research, including the Open Internet Stack constituencies. Relevant research from both the supply and the demand side of 3C networks should be considered in this regard, thus ensuring participation of research organisations from all across the value chain.

Finally, digital autonomy in edge and cloud implies that computation infrastructure should be able to be sourced from European technology, including non-terrestrial network infrastructure. The subsequent step following the EU investments in processors for HPC (under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking) is to extend its success to the rest of the computing continuum. Therefore, the project will also seek to coordinate with other EU (HE) research activities with a view to integrating new processor architectures into cloud edge infrastructures as they become available.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

[1] Such as UNICO 6G in Spain, CAMPUS-OS in Germany, 6G Flagship in Finland, etc.

News flashes